Iranian Culture

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Iranian Culture

Throughout modern Iranian history, culture has served as a means of imposing unity and cohesion onto society. The Pahlavi monarchs used it to project an image of Iran as an ancient civilization, reemerging as an equal to Western nations, while the revolutionaries deployed it to remake the country into an Islamic nation. Just as Iranian culture has been continually reinterpreted, the representations and avocations of Iranian identity vary among Iranians across the world. Iranian Culture: Representation and Identity demonstrates these fissures and the incompatibilities that refuse to be written out of national culture, analyzing works of literature, popular music, graphic art and film, as well as oral narratives. Using works produced before and after the 1979 revolution, created both inside and outside Iran, this study reveals neglected complexities and contradictions in the field of Iranian cultural production. It considers how contested claims to culture, whether they originated in Iran or the Iranian diaspora, shape our understanding of this culture and what spaces they create for new articulations of it, and in doing so offers an important reexamination of our collective concept of culture. This book would be an excellent resource for students and scholars of Middle East studies and Iranian studies, specifically Iranian culture, including film and contemporary literature and the Iranian diaspora.

Nasrin Rahimieh is Howard Baskerville Professor of Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her teaching and research are focused on modern Persian literature and culture. She is author of Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History . Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Iranian Studies Edited by Homa Katouzian, University of Oxford and Mohamad Tavakoli, University of Toronto

Since 1967 the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS) has been a leading learned society for the advancement of new approaches in the study of Ira- nian society, history, culture, and literature. The new ISIS Iranian Studies series published by Routledge will provide a venue for the publication of original and innovative scholarly works in all areas of Iranian and Persianate Studies.

1 Journalism in Iran 7 Continuity in Iranian Identity From mission to profession Resilience of a cultural heritage Hossein Shahidi Fereshteh Davaran

2 Sadeq Hedayat 8 New Perspectives on Safavid Iran His work and his wondrous world Empire and society Edited by Homa Katouzian Edited by Colin P. Mitchell

3 Iran in the 21st Century 9 Islamic Tolerance Politics, economics and conflict Amīr Khusraw and pluralism Edited by Homa Katouzian and Alyssa Gabbay Hossein Shahidi 10 City of Knowledge in Twentieth 4 Media, Culture and Society Century Iran in Iran Shiraz, history and poetry Living with globalization and the Setrag Manoukian Islamic State 11 Domestic Violence in Iran Edited by Mehdi Semati Women, marriage and Islam Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Zahra Tizro 5 Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan 12 Gnostic Apocalypse and Islam Anomalous visions of history Qur’an, exegesis, messianism, and form and the literary origins of the Babi Wali Ahmadi religion Todd Lawson 6 The Politics of Iranian Cinema Film and society in the Islamic 13 Social Movements in Iran Republic Environmentalism and civil society Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad Simin Fadaee 14 Iranian-Russian Encounters 22 Nomads in Post-Revolutionary Empires and revolutions since 1800 Iran Edited by Stephanie Cronin The Qashqa’i in an era of change Lois Beck 15 Iran Politics, history and literature 23 Persian Language, Literature Homa Katouzian and Culture New leaves, fresh looks 16 Domesticity and Consumer Edited by Kamran Talattof Culture in Iran Interior Revolutions of the 24 The Daēva Cult in the Gāthās Modern Era An ideological archaeology of Pamela Karimi Zoroastrianism Amir Ahmadi 17 The Development of the Babi/ Baha’i Communities 25 The Revolutionary Guards in Exploring Baron Rosen’s Archives Iranian Politics Youli Ioannesyan Elites and shifting relations Bayram Sinkaya 18 Culture and Cultural Politics Under Reza Shah 26 Kirman and the Qajar Empire The Pahlavi state, new bourgeoisie Local dimensions of modernity in and the creation of a modern Iran, 1794–1914 society in Iran James M Gustafson Bianca Devos and Christoph Werner 27 The Thousand and One Borders 19 Recasting Iranian Modernity of Iran International relations and social Travel and identity change Fariba Adelkhah Kamran Matin 28 Iranian Culture 20 The Sīh-rōzag in Zoroastrianism Representation and identity A textual and historico-religious Nasrin Rahimieh analysis Enrico G. Raffaelli 29 The Historiography of Persian Architecture 21 Literary Subterfuge and Edited by Mohammad Gharipour Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Contemporary Persian Fiction Who writes Iran? Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Iranian Culture Representation and identity

Nasrin Rahimieh Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Nasrin Rahimieh The right of Nasrin Rahimieh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rahimieh, Nasrin. Iranian culture : representation and identity / Nasrin Rahimieh. pages cm. — (Iranian studies ; 28) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Iran—Civilization. 2. Iran—Intellectual life. I. Title. DS266.R275 2016 955—dc23 2015007782 ISBN: 978-1-138-91378-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-69118-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 To the memory of my parents, Mahommad Rasoul Rahimieh and Oranous Hadidian, for teaching me that one could be at home in multiple languages and cultures Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Contents

List of figures x Acknowledgments xi Note on transliteration xiii

Introduction 1

1 Back to the future: time travel and Iranian identity 16

2 Shooting the past, staging the revolution 43

3 Stage managing the return of the repressed 62

4 From the displaced to the misplaced 84

5 The hen’s husband, or deterritorializations of Persian 104

6 Illuminating internal alterities 127

Conclusion 143

Index 151 Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Figures

1.1 Cover of Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid 21 2.1 Googoosh LP album cover 50 3.1 Poster for Maxx 69 4.1 Simon Ordoubadi poster (Houman Mortazavi) 91 4.2 Simon Ordoubadi poster (Houman Mortazavi) 95 Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Acknowledgments

This book originated from my experiences as Maseeh Chair and Director, 2006– 2014, of the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the Univer- sity of California, Irvine. I am grateful for the opportunities this Center afforded me to engage with students, colleagues, and members of the Iranian American community. The Maseeh Chair endowment, generously established by the Mas- siah Foundation, greatly enabled my research. I reserve a special recognition for Dr. Fariborz Maseeh, the founding benefactor of the Center. I would like to also acknowledge my fellow colleagues at the Center, Touraj Daryaee and Hossein Omoumi, and the Center’s manager, Angélica Enríquez, who were part of the eight-year journey that resulted in this book. The Center’s multidisciplinary projects that brought intellectuals, scholars, writers, filmmakers, and artists together were particularly enriching for me. I thank Mazyar Lotfalian for his support in their design and execution. Mike Fischer, Kim and Mike Fortun, and George Marcus provided crucial intellectual support and helped carve out a space for reimagining the study of Iran. I am grateful for their intellectual support and guidance. Shervin Emami, Sharareh Frouzesh, Philip Grant, Allia Ida Griffin, Alexan- der Jabbari, Monica Katiboglu, Shadee Malaklou, Ali Meghdadi, Ghada Mourad, Leila Pazargadi, Mohammad Rafi, Guilan Siassi, Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki, Parisa Vaziri, and Kyle Wanberg at UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, and UC San Diego have all contributed to the development of my ideas. Our exchanges in graduate semi- nars, conferences, and symposia were part of the process that shaped this inquiry. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kyle Wanberg and Sharareh Frouzesh for

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 including me in the writing group they initiated in the summer of 2011 that served as a valuable forum for working through drafts. This book came into its own during the last four years of my mother’s life when she divided her time between California and Alberta. Her needs, she sometimes worried, would prevent me from writing this book. She had taken care of her ailing mother for nine years and she knew well the demands of caregiving. But the time we spent together was most beneficial to me and has deeply informed elements of this book. I am indebted to my sister, Nahid Naini, for sharing the responsibility of caregiving and supporting me during the most painful stages toward the end of our xii Acknowledgments mother’s life. No words can sufficiently express my gratitude to her and my husband, George Lang, who assumed his share of caregiving and provided me with much needed solace. Along with our feline companions, Helga, Khaki, and Zel- zeleh, he has always helped me find my way back home. Farzaneh Milani and Eliz Sanasarian have been remarkable friends, colleagues, and mentors. These two pioneering women’s scholarship and words of wisdom have helped me face some of the most challenging aspects of Iranian culture. I am grateful to them for their trust, candor, and friendship. I am especially grateful to Houman Mortazavi for providing me with images from his Project Misplaced and giving me permission to reproduce them in this book. I thank Saman Moghadam for his responses to my queries and for permit- ting the use of a poster for his film Maxx , and Jesse Kaminsky for the use of one of Googoosh’s old album covers. I would like to also acknowledge Iraj Pezeshkzad for permission to reproduce the cover of his novel. I thank Mazda Publishers for permission to include in Chapter Five an expanded version of “Translating Taghi Modarressi’s Writing with an Accent,” first published in 2012 in Iranian Languages and Culture: Essays in Honor of Gernot Lud- wig Windfuhr, edited by Behrad Aghaei and M. R. Ghanoonparvar. I also thank Bloomsbury Academic Publishing for permission to reproduce in Chapter Six a revised and expanded version of “Armenians in Iran, or the Limits of Cosmo- politanism,” first published in 2014 in Iranian Identity and Cosmopolitanism: Spheres of Belonging , edited by Lucian Stone. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Note on transliteration

For transliterations of Persian I follow the style of the journal Iranian Studies . Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Introduction

This project stems from my experiences as director of a university center for Ira- nian studies in southern California over a period of eight years and my repeated encounters with incompatible representations and avocations of Iranian identity. Given Iran’s recent political trajectory I was hardly surprised to run into contested views about the nation as an object of study or as an organizational frame of reference. Before assuming the position of director, I knew that contending with the diverse views of what is believed to be the largest community of Iranians outside Iran would be challenging. What I had not anticipated was the intensity and per- vasiveness of the impulse among a large number of my compatriots to maintain a narrow definition of Iranian cultural identity in opposition to all other attempts at self-definition. The multiplicity of Iranian cultural and community associations in southern California appeared to find their very reason for being in describing and illustrating what they believed to be the “essence” of Iranian culture. What such entities expected of a university center was to sanction their particular articulation and foreclose all other possible entitlements to Iranian culture. Their demand for the “right” way to study and speak about Iran emanated from a desire to reveal the “truth” about Iranian culture. While I had believed that experimenting with coexistence of contradictory claims to Iranian cultural identity was the proper work of a university cultural center, I found that it ran counter to individual or group investments, pecuniary or ideological. It became clear that in these interactions my role was intended to endorse given views of Iranian culture, and with the backing of an institution of higher learning. My failure to act accordingly led to disappointments on the part of the self-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 appointed or elected representatives of the local Iranian communities. Notwith- standing, this process of being witness to the conflicting totalizations of culture led me to see a potential I had missed earlier: I was missing the forest for the trees. I realized that the more urgent question to consider was how these contested claims, whether they originated in Iran or the Iranian diaspora, shaped our understanding of culture and what spaces they created for new articulations of it. This book is the product of the work that emerged out of my inquiries into cultural products, normally not considered as exemplary expressions of Iranian culture, that highlight the fissures and the incompatibilities within and make room for the undesirable and disavowed forms of cultural expression. The constructs of culture 2 Introduction we glimpse through them are far less categorical or prescriptive, suggesting a need to reexamine our collective concept of culture. In what follows I briefly delineate the conceptual and theoretical frame for this study as well as key determinants for my own investments, personal and intellectual. The manner in which I began this introduction might suggest that I see myself as the analytical observer of southern California Iranian Americans, but, as I will demonstrate, I also see myself necessarily entangled in it rather than standing outside the field I examine. Indeed, throughout this book there runs as if in counterpoint a thread connecting its more analytical themes and topics to my own experience and life history as one of the subjects with which I am dealing. An apt point of departure for the conceptual foundations of this study is the concept of nostalgia and the ways in which it affects me and other members of the Iranian American community in which I live and work. The inflexibility vis-à- vis the idea of Iranian culture I describe can be seen as a product of exile and the type of nostalgia Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia , which “puts emphasis on nostos [home] and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” She distinguishes it from reflective nostalgia, which “dwells in algia [pain], in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.” Among Iranian Americans with whom I interacted in my capacity as director, there was far less concern with vagaries of memory and a greater emphasis on reconstruc- tions of an idealized past. Equally relevant to the tendency I observed among southern California Iranians is Boym’s claim that restorative nostalgics “do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe their project is about truth” (41). Boym’s analysis also suggests that the single-minded preoccupation with setting the record straight about Iran is not exclusively about the past. In her words, “Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future. Consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales” (XVI). These insights helped me better grasp why some of my compatriots, highly successful professionals and entrepreneurs, dedicated the little free time they could spare to the task of supporting Iranian culture and its preservation and memorialization. I could also understand their frustration with my desire to expand the parameters of the notion of culture. The Iranians who came to California in the wake of the 1979 revolution had witnessed a radical, to say nothing of violent, transformation of Iranian cultural norms which they identified as an integral part of their identity. The experience of loss naturally

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 fueled a desire in them to restore and maintain what was seen as threatened with extinction. In my own transplantation, I had not experienced a similar sense of rupture, at least in so far as my departure from Iran had been voluntary and had preceded the revolution. Moreover, for me the study of Iran has both a professional and a personal significance. If I am drawn to my field of study because of accidents of birth and history, I have also been shaped by the critiques to which concepts of “culture” and “identity” have been subjected from a variety of disciplines and theoretical formulations, ranging from psychoanalysis to feminism and deconstruction. The Introduction 3 insights borne out of such critical turns de-essentialize identity and, as pointed out by Stuart Hall, remind us that the

concept of identity does not signal that stable of core of the self, unfolding from the beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change: the bit of self which remains always-already “the same.” Identical to itself across time. Nor – if we translate this essentializing conception to the stage of cultural identity – is it that “collective or true self hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’ which a people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” [. . .] and which stabilize, fix, or guarantee an unchanging “oneness” or cultural belongingness underlying all the other superficial differences. It accepts that identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. (“Introduction” 3–4)

The knowledge of such contingencies informs my own approach to manifestations of Iranian cultural identity and distances me from totalizing tendencies. That is not to say that in my case the boundaries between the intellectual and the psychic spheres do not blur or that I am not subject to nostalgia and the illusions it can foster. In fact, I empathize with other displaced Iranian Americans’ nostalgia. Recently I found a particularly deep echo of my own bouts of nostalgia in Gohar Homayounpour’s Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran . After years of training and analysis in the US, she finds herself fantasizing about a seamless return home. But in Tehran she is confronted with a different reality: “How painful it has been to become disillusioned. My great native land was not the way I remembered it, and the person I had become was not the way people remembered me” (43). And yet a few months after what Homayounpour calls her “mediocre return,” she is taken aback by a sense of nostalgia for Tehran as she leaves the city for a visit to Boston:

I could see the city I had longed for all these years. The city that had taught me the meaning of nostalgia; the city of mountains unmatched anywhere else in the world, its stunning streets with ancient trees lining both sides; and yet in the months that had elapsed since my return I had not even remembered to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 look at the mountains. I was furious at Tehran for keeping me in a state of longing all these years, only to end up disappointing me. I felt betrayed by Tehran, and yet while the plane was taking off, it suddenly all came back. I could not believe I was feeling nostalgic: I already missed Tehran; I could feel starting to reminisce, and it was as if the last few months had never happened. It was as if I had a sado- masochistic relationship with my memory; whatever my memory did to betray me I could find myself trusting it, only to be abandoned by it all over again. (44) 4 Introduction The psychic terrain Homayounpour traverses at the moment of departure can be mapped onto other similar moments experienced by migrants who have left a home that subsequently becomes the object of their longing. I too have suffered from nostalgia and profound disappointments when I have gone back to Iran to discover, like Homayounpour, that the “home” of my imagination is far from the reality on the ground. And by the time I accepted to direct a center for the study of Iranian culture, I knew well that I needed to learn and investigate not only what I remembered fondly about Iran but also what I was loath to accept as belonging to Iranian culture and having any hold on me. Moreover, anyone in my position, whether or not from Iranian origins, would have to contend with the dynamics of home and diaspora and resist the urge to become an interpreter of all things Iranian or to package Iranian culture for pleasurable display and consumption. Coming to the job with this mindset I did not view my task at the university as analogous to that of a museum director engaged in carefully selecting what would appear under the banner of Iranian culture. My personal preferences notwithstanding, I was committed to examining all aspects of Iranian culture, past and present, including how culture was being shaped in a theocracy and in stark opposition to the values that had been part of my own socialization and education in Iran before the 1979 revolution. And yet this intellectual clarity and sense of purpose did not exempt me from being struck by the gap separating a carefully delineated, display- worthy representation of Iranian culture and its ever-changing and unruly facets. In the face of this disjuncture I found myself eager to discover what prevented “us” from looking at all that lay outside a particular bounded view of culture and why certain aspects of Iranian culture caused us embarrassment. My use of the pronoun “us” here is deliberate and indicative of the recognition that my position as an academic does not exempt me from the politics of the Iranian American community and that I am subject to the competing demands of its members. At yet another level, it is my acknowledgment that in this study I am at once subject and object. Equally fundamental to this study is the term “culture” as understood in contemporary Persian. Farhang is the most commonly cited word in Persian today to denote culture, as in the literary and cultural phenomena in which Iranian history is steeped. It is most frequently used to refer to high culture, but farhang has not always meant what it connotes today. In his Ta ‘ rifha va mafhim-e farhang [Defini- tions and Meanings of Farhang], Dariush Ashuri, a public intellectual with expertise and interest ranging from lexicography to literature, sociology, and political

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 science, states that the word originated in ancient Persian. Another scholar, Sadeq Kia, writes: “The ancient form of ‘farhang’ has not been found in what remains of the Avesta [Zoroastrian sacred texts] and ancient Persian writings. Its Pahlavi [Middle Persian] form is ‘fra-hang.’ It is believed to be composed of the prefix ‘fra’ meaning anterior and the ancient root of ‘thang’ meaning to draw” (25). Ashuri lists instances of the root meaning in other Persian nouns and verbs and concludes that in Middle Persian frahang would have primarily meant to educate. In H. S. Nyberg’s Manual of Pahlavi, we find a confirmation of Ashuri’s definition of farhang in Middle Persian as “education, breeding, training, instruction” (74–75). Ashuri provides a variety of examples of the use of farhang in New Introduction 5 Persian (the language that emerged after the arrival of Islam in Iran) before moving on to definitions of the term “culture” in European languages to ultimately arrive at “the tale of the marriage of the expression ‘farhang’ in Persian to the term ‘culture’ in French and German and English and its acquiring their meaning, which in itself represents a great historical and cultural transformation in our language and thought that resulted from the encounter between Eastern and Western cultures” (155–56).1 In the original Persian, Ashuri cites the terms used in European languages that help to demarcate the phonetic and etymological differences between the Iranian and European languages; the Persian word farhang , he argues, transformed itself to signify culture, or Kultur . Using the metaphor of marriage, Ashuri is careful to avoid a suggestion of linguistic colonization of Persian. And yet most of his book is devoted to explaining the various meanings of culture in European languages and traditions, as if the marriage he invokes was not between two equal partners. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a renowned philosopher and scholar of Iranian and Islamic studies, concurs with Ashuri about the process of transformation to which the Persian term for culture has been subjected. In his “Notes on the Definition of Persian Culture,” Nasr writes:

It must be remembered that the term farhang , which is now used universally in Persian as the equivalent of the English or French term “culture,” in its present meaning came into being in the last century. In classical Persian texts the closest term to “culture” was perhaps honar , which is now identified with art. [. . .] Moreover, when the term “culture” was first translated into Persian, many authors preferred to use ma ‘ aref, a very rich term that relates culture to knowledge and ultimately divine knowledge, which is connected to the term. (20)

The shift away from associations with divine knowledge is captured in Deh- khoda’s dictionary, where the entry for farhang reads: “A complex mixture that encompasses knowledge, beliefs, arts, manners, laws, and habits, and all other abilities acquired by a human being as a member of a society.”2 Nasr and Ashuri take different positions vis-à-vis the transformations they observe in the meaning of the term farhang . Ashuri finds the process a good reminder of the fact that “culture is a living entity subject to transformation”

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 (156), while Nasr cites the neglected history of the unfavorable changes that have taken place:

Few modern Persians are even aware that the term “culture” has had a short history in the West and that its Persian equivalent, farhang , is itself a late arrival in the Persian language in its present connotation. In fact, to speak of Persian culture is itself a response to and acceptance of the categories of an alien worldview whose dominance over the Persian world has done so much to diminish and weaken Persian culture. (20) 6 Introduction While decrying the erosion of the spiritual and the transcendental dimensions of ma ‘ aref , Nasr finds a means of unity within the differences of opinion:

[A] Persian who speaks of farhang-e iran (Persian or Iranian culture) is referring to everything that is positive in the life, thought, and art of Persian society and its people and that identifies Persians as Persians. Contemporary Persians differ sharply as to what are the most important or least important elements of this farhang and the historical causes involved in the development of its various strands. There is little disagreement, however, about its central role and the necessity to guard and preserve it, at least the parts that are most congenial to the character and mental habits of the particular person in question. (21)

The consensus Nasr identifies is more tenable with regard to phenomena ema- nating from the premodern era. Nasr’s analysis pertains precisely to what he calls “traditional Persian culture,” which he contrasts with “modern manifestations” (21). This particular focus enables Nasr to move to what he views as “[o]ne of the remarkable characteristics of Persian culture,” which he describes as “unity in multiplicity, preserving an unmistakable unity while providing diverse intellectual, religious, spiritual, and artistic possibilities within its fold” (21). These accommodating frames of reference are far less visible in the domain of my investigation, i.e., the more complicated and less harmonious materializations of Ira- nian culture today in and outside Iran. For southern California diaspora Iranians the very discussion of what can be considered a “positive” aspect or contribution of Iranian culture is open to debate, particularly among those who see the arrival of Islam and the amalgamation that inflected Persian language, thought, and the arts as far from salutary. This more negative view of the Iranian embrace of Islam further reduces the chances of arriving at consensus over what can be housed under the rubric of Iranian culture. Hence the tendency to distill, to purify, and to essentialize culture, reminding us of what Michael Fischer calls the “failure to use a sufficiently rich concept of culture” (5). Fischer points to ways of enriching the concept of culture by expanding the range of material considered in the study of culture:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Modern historians and Orientalists studying Iran tend to spend as much time in the country as do anthropologists; yet there is often a curious difference in flavor in the writings of those whose myopia is focused on the written word, on piecing together documentary fragments of a past reality, and those whose myopia is fixed on oral expression, on the nuances of reference, social allusion, and style, which make up the rich web of lived-in experience. (5)

The kind of opening of the field of vision Fischer calls for implies a willingness to move across disciplinary boundaries. This is the method Fischer and Abedi Introduction 7 put to the test in their Debating Muslims ; it invites “new interlocutors that can contribute to the construction of more adequate intercultural concepts, language, and theory for the pluralist global society that is fast becoming a reality” (382). This call for disciplinary and theoretical pluralism acts as a detour away from my center, in the sense of both the center I directed and the center posited by Iranian studies as the home for all forms of studying Iran. Iranian studies, as a form of area studies, is in its conceptual origins multidisciplinary. But within its fold there appear both disciplinary clusters as well as forays into cross-disciplinarity. My own tenure (2006–2008) as president of the largest academic association devoted to the study of Iran, the International Society for Iranian Studies, made me appreciate how very difficult it is to leave the comfort of one’s own intellectual training and converse and interact with colleagues in other disciplines, let alone strive for alternative models to our disciplinary orthodoxies. Perhaps my term of service in the foremost scholarly association had primed me for the kind of intellectual reorientation George Marcus invokes. Quoting Roland Barthes, he writes:

“To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a subject (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.” While such a seductively unattainable object is not in sight, in the pursuit of it, the category “disciplines,” and the canons that stand for them are objectified and constructed in such centers to refigure and blur the boundaries of the scholarly communities that are constituted by this pursuit. (104)

The irony is not lost on me that as the director of a center, I could not enact a similar process of blurring of boundaries without alienating some fellow Iranian Americans. But if a university center for Iranian studies is not the place where the concept of farhang can be challenged, where might one turn to find other inter- pretive models of culture? The question is not purely rhetorical, given the history and origins of Iranian universities and their asymmetrical valorization of science, technology, and medicine on the one hand and the “human sciences” on the other.3 The first institution of higher learning, Dar al-Fonun, established in 1851, was a polytechnic. The impetus for its creation came from perception of the need that

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 to defend itself against Russian encroachments on Iranian territory, the country needed to revamp its army and acquire modern weaponry as well as knowledge of advances in technology.4 The curriculum offered at the polytechnic was heavily weighted toward engineering and the modern sciences. Farzin Vahdat argues that Iran’s encounter with modernity from these early days has produced “a duality: a strong interest in the military and technological aspects of modernity side by side with a weaker appreciation of its socio-political aspects – in particular, democratic institutions” (28). This early emphasis on science and technology also produced a less robust understanding of the human sciences as modern disciplines equally meritorious. For my generation of Iranians, there was a clear hierarchy of fields of 8 Introduction study at the level of universities. Being admitted into medicine was synonymous with superior intelligence and academic success. In contrast, being accepted into literature was a sign of lackluster performance on the university entrance exams. These perceptions, despite the presence of eminent humanists in Iranian universities, indicate modern Iranian understanding of what was believed to be needed for personal and national progress. They also reveal an assumption that knowledge of culture, literature, and the arts can be accessed without advanced degrees. Irani- ans, even those who have received little formal schooling, it is frequently argued, can recite verses of poetry from memory, suggesting an internalization of cultural identity, or what Stuart Hall theorizes as one of the two ways of thinking about identity:

The first position defines “cultural identity” in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective “one true self,” hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves,” which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as “one people,” with stable, unchanging, and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our cultural history. This “oneness,” underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth. (“Cultural” 234)

This kind of drive to locate a shared destiny is inextricably interwoven with modern Iranian history and has on occasion led to reenvisioning of premodern history to arrive at a continuous narrative of identity. For example, this is how the late Shahrokh Meskoob, writer and intellectual, depicts Iran in the wake of the arrival of Islam in Iran in the seventh century: “It took two hundred years of consternation at this homelessness and alienation before Iran was able gradually to revive and resume its life. I am talking about Iranians as a single nation, as a people, with an identity of their own, and not as scattered individuals” (28). We see the workings of restorative nostalgia in Meskoob’s rereading of history and we can glimpse its appeal among exiled Iranians who chafe at the Islamic Republic’s countless codes of dress and conduct. The second approach Hall pinpoints has none of the stability and fixity of the

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This second position recognizes that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute “what we really are”; or rather – since history has intervened – “what we have become.” We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about “one experience, one identity,” without acknowledging its other side – the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute its [. . .] “uniqueness.” Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of “becoming” as well as “being.” It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something that already Introduction 9 exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture, and power. Far from being grounded in mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (“Cultural” 236)

Thinking about Iranian cultural identity along these lines would be particularly productive, for it would highlight the continuous shifts and flows that are part and parcel of the making of Iran as a modern nation. Many historians attribute the absence of the more fluid conceptualizations of Iranian identity to its encounter with modernity and an internalization of a sense of belatedness vis-à-vis the West. For instance, the historian Mohamad Tavakoli- Targhi writes:

By claiming that Persian publication of Descartes in the 1860s is the beginning of a new age of rationality and modernity, [Iranian] historians provide a narrative account that accommodates and reinforces the foundational myth of modern Orientalism, a myth that constitutes “the West” as ontologically and epistemologically different from “the Orient.” This Orientalist problematic has been validated by a nationalist historiography that constitutes the period prior to its own arrival as a time of decay, backwardness, and despotism. By deploying the basic dogmas of Orientalism for the enhancement of its own political project, in this sense, Iranian nationalist historiography has participated “in its own Orientalizing.” ( Refashioning 8)

Measuring the self in relation to the West has resulted in a sense of inadequacy or, as the Iranian philosopher Daryoush Shayegan has argued, in going “on a Holiday from History” (12) and being caught in a perpetual fear of losing one’s identity. In a series of essays entitled Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, he argues that his native Iran, like other Islamic states, has

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 failed to recognize the epistemic shift that separates it from the West and causes it to “remain unaware of the historical breaks which turned the West into the stronghold of modernity, and the other civilizations of the world into enormous ancient monuments” (37). Other historians and intellectuals reject the age-old binary of tradition and modernity and offer their own model for understanding the paradoxes of modern Iranian history. One such cultural historian, Hamid Dabashi, argues:

[. . . B]oth as an idea and as historical reality Iran is the dialectical outcome of two diametrically opposed forces – one centrifugal and the other centripetal, 10 Introduction one pulling Iran asunder from the edges of its communal fears and the other focusing it on an imaginary center, a wishful gathering of its collective hopes. While its racialized minorities (who are the majority of Iranians) and varied ethnicities are pulling it asunder, its drive toward an anticolonial modernity with which it has been blessed and afflicted pulls it together. (27)

The acknowledgment of Iran’s ethnic minorities notwithstanding, the center/ periphery metaphor is not exempt from the oppositional dynamics referred to by Tavakoli-Targhi. Nevertheless Dabashi maintains that it can “rescue Iran from its false claims to cultural authenticity and relocate it back in the regional geopolitics of its presence in history, in the cosmopolitan disposition of its syncretic culture – multifaceted, polyvocal, a festive carnival of incongruities” (28). What might be the preconditions that would deliver the promised fulfillment of Iran’s potentialities? Can geopolitics override national politics, and how might it be characterized differently from politics itself? Is it possible to wish or will this polyvocality to override the logic of binary opposites that has held sway in modern Iranian history? Or might it be more constructive to grasp the impulses that ascribe unitary concepts of culture? I have found in Étienne Balibar’s notion of political community insights that help me think through the dominance of the conflicting claims to modern Iranian culture. In Politics and the Other Scene , he writes:

I defend the idea that the contradictory nature of the notion of political community (which requires both unity and diversity, conflict and consent, integration and exclusion, substantial identity and openness to indefinite change) reflects a tension not only between the real and the ideal, or between different “imagined communities”, but also between self-assertion and deconstruction of community as such – or the opposite requirement of “identification” and “disidentification”. My thesis is that democratic politics is a difficult, “ambiguous” art of combining the opposed terms of identification and disidentification (including identification with the universal ), and for that reason it remains permanently exposed to turning into its opposite (x).

Transposed to the Iranian scene, we might see a near absence of the ambigu-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ous art Balibar pinpoints. In its place we observe a shuttling between identification and disidentification. The extreme visibility of the polarized and polarizing scene of the modern Iranian nation has obscured what Balibar calls the “other scene.” Inspired by Freud’s use of the term to illustrate the heterogeneous nature of psychic processes, Balibar invokes the “other scene” to foreground a similar “essential heterogeneity” for political processes. Balibar’s understanding does not “return to the idea that ‘ideas drive history’, but [. . .] emphasize[s] the fact that ‘material processes are themselves (over- and under-) determined by the processes of the imaginary, which have their own materiality and need to be unveiled” (xiii). He further clarifies: “all forces which interact in the economic-political realm are Introduction 11 also collective groupings, and consequently possess an (ambivalent) imaginary identity” (xiii). This notion of political process does not construe politics as something that happens in isolation from the social, cultural, and economic scenes, but is deeply enmeshed in them. Drawing on Étienne Balibar’s concept of the “other scene,” I expose the “amount of information that is either structurally inaccessible to, or deliberately concealed” (xii) in the circulation of ideas about Iran and Iranian identity, highlighting the ways in which some writers, filmmakers, and artists have worked against the grain of the dominant national imaginary of their time. To echo Bali- bar, through their works the artists and writers reveal “that there is no identity which is ‘self-identical’; that all identity is fundamentally ambiguous ” (57). What if we approached Iranian identity as fundamentally ambiguous and not always a conscious and transparent self-portrayal? This led me to a rereading and review- ing of works of fiction, cinema, and graphic art in search of the repressed and the disavowed elements of farhang . By allowing them space in our thinking about culture, we might be able to face some of our collective anxiety about who we are and how we are seen. In an effort to create an encounter between the idealizations of Iranian culture and its repressed and disavowed manifestations, I will interweave my analysis of the literary and cultural works with some of my more challenging experiences of navigating the fields of culture as an Iranian studies scholar of Iranian origin. The experiences I narrate are not meant to offer definitive representations of the whole of a community, dubious as such an entirety would be, but rather to use “empirically grounded and reconstructed fragments such as individual lives [. . .] as vehicles for exploring the multiple horizons of knowledge and for locating these vehicles one against another” (Fischer and Abedi 382). The oral narratives I include in the chapters of this book do not represent only my experiences. They also reflect the voice of the California Iranian diaspora as well as interlocutors in Iran. Through the juxtapositions of oral, visual, and literary narratives that together offer discordant representations of what we believe to be our farhang I hope to shed the desire for purity in favor of complexity. In the stories we create for our own and others’ consumption about ourselves I look for the “stranger within” whose presence makes us uncomfortable but who circulates in the ways we talk about ourselves. My thinking about this process has been inflected by Gohar Homayounpour’s Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran. In the Preface to this work,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 entitled “Is Psychoanalysis Possible in the Islamic Republic of Iran?”, she cites a response she wrote to the person who interviewed her for an Italian psychoanalytic journal about the possibility of a successful transplantation of psychoanalysis to Iran: “Iranian culture revolves around stories. People here are very much into talking, talking, and talking; and so the talking cure has found itself taken to the heart of the Iranian national character” (xxvii). My contention is that in all this talking and telling we can give voice to both what unsettles us about and makes us proud of our farhang . I also argue that we need to be attuned to the silences and absences that mark our stories. My hope is to make similar disruptions possible in the divergent representations of Iranian culture and, in Gohar Homayounpour’s 12 Introduction words, “to come face to face with the stranger within [ourselves], and to learn to bear the anxiety of participating in the unknown” (xv). In Chapter One , I examine a satirical novel by Iraj Pezeshkzad, a career diplomat and satirist, about time travel. Mashallah Khan in the Court of Harun al-Rashid is a lighthearted tale published in the decades before the 1979 revolution. Its protagonist is a man of little social means who dreams of traveling back to the eighth century and the reign of the ‘Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. When his wish comes true, he does not escape his fears, lack of courage, or anxieties, but in this alien linguistic and cultural setting he has to rely on his wits to survive. Reading the novel contrapuntally against the backdrop of some of the changes that Iran experienced under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, I demonstrate how flights of fancy spill over from the realm of the fictional into Iran’s cultural history. Examined from the perspective of Pezeshkzad’s fictional representation of traveling back in time to compensate for the inadequacies of the present, the monarch’s dreams of grandeur and his desire to propel Iran into the future acquire a new type of legibility. I devote the second chapter to a song performed by Googoosh, Iran’s most celebrated and beloved diva of the era before the 1979 revolution. “Q. Q. Bang Bang,” as it is entitled, offers a representation of the Iranian social and popular culture scene at least among the upwardly mobile middle and upper middle classes. What makes this song particularly interesting is the way in which it conflates this representation of the past with Googoosh’s career and her visual prominence. Capitalizing on Googoosh’s reputation as a pre-revolutionary star, the song attempts to forge a bond of familiarity and commonality of experience between the singer and her audience of Iranians who, like her, find themselves in exile. The collectivity the song engages is far from inclusive and offers a construction of the past that, like Mohammad Reza Shah’s, has a highly performative function. The pre-revolutionary popular culture scene recalled in “Q. Q. Bang Bang” reveals the unimagined and unintended consequences of the concept of playful constructions of identity. In Chapter Three , I analyze the cultural gap between the inheritors of the 1979 revolution and its outcasts in a comic film made by Saman Moghadam in Iran in 2005 entitled Maxx . I situate the film in the cultural and political developments of the late 1990s and the early 2000s and the climate of openness that made visits to their homeland more inviting for some diaspora Iranians. The film capitalizes

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 on the possibility of return journeys for a comical representation of an imaginary encounter between an Iranian American from Los Angeles and his official Iranian hosts. Drawing on exaggerations and stereotypes presented in the mold of a musical comedy, Maxx makes it possible for Iranian spectators living in and outside Iran to see some of their worst fears about what has become of their disavowed other. Away from harsh images of Iran as a nation caught in revolutionary fervor and a brutal war, the film makes potentially difficult encounters between exile and home into objects for entertainment. But the film also reveals, despite its reliance on the conventions of musical comedy, the impossibility of a “happy ending,” gesturing to the politics of identity and the performances it demands. Introduction 13 Journeys in the opposite direction, i.e., from home to an Iranian diaspora community, become the focus of Chapter Four. I base my analysis on the work of the Iranian graphic artist Houman Mortazavi, more specifically on a series of posters published under the title Project Misplaced: The Rise and Fall of Simon Ordoubadi, depicting a Los Angeles Iranian who advertises an impossible array of services. While the persona Mortazavi created and projected onto the posters is entirely fictional, it carries traces of the artist’s perception of the Iranian American community of Los Angeles and his own troubled encounters with it. The posters become for him a battleground between the familiar and the alien, the cherished and the despised iterations of Iranianness. The mix of the visual and the verbal and the absence of a linear narrative gives these projections of the displaced Ira- nian a haphazardness and randomness that refuse fixity and finality. Reflecting the complex forms and sites of belonging is Mortazavi’s own return to Iran where he has resumed his career as a graphic artist. Delving still deeper into the questions of language and the Persian language’s relationship to the ways in which Iranian national identity has been imagined, in Chapter Five, I study the works of the late Iranian immigrant writer Taghi Modar- ressi. Having begun his career as a writer in Iran, Modarressi came to the US to continue his medical studies. Long after he had established himself as a child psychiatrist and had not had any urge to write fiction, he rediscovered an internal voice that drew him back to writing novels in Persian. While he only wrote in Persian, he translated his own novels from Persian into English, but his self- translations relied on literal translations that left traces of the original. He referred to his approach as translating with an accent. As the translator of his last novel, I discovered other layers of linguistic deterritorialization in his native Persian. Against the backdrop of Modarressi’s reflections on the language of an immigrant writer, I examine Modarressi’s fiction for questions it raises about the presumed purity and constancy of Persian as the glue to Iranian cultural identity. In the latter part of this chapter I explore the resonances I found between the manifestations of loss of language in Modarressi’s fiction and the type of erosion of language I witnessed through the different stages of my mother’s dementia. While Modarressi’s language bore traces of anxiety about losing proficiency in Persian, my mother’s exhibited a desire for control not unlike the language of newly transplanted Irani- ans, a creative amalgam of the familiar and the strange. In my final chapter, “Illuminating Internal Alterities,” I extend the concept of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 deterritorialization of the Persian language back to contemporary Iran and the fictional works of an Armenian Iranian writer, Zoya Pirzad. Pirzad writes in Persian, publishes her works in Iran, and has enjoyed immense popularity among Iranian readers. Rendering ordinary lives of characters who speak Armenian at home and among fellow Armenian Iranians into Persian inserts them into daily lives that intersect with those of Iranians who speak Persian or other dialects and/or languages spoken in Iran. This representation of linguistic difference also evokes differences of ethnicity and religion, but instead of making alterity its sole focus, the narrative juxtaposes Armenian Iranians’ engagement with the history of their displacement and territorial loss and their participation in oppositional politics 14 Introduction prior to the 1979 revolution. The narrativization of such forms of affiliation across linguistic, ethnic, and religious divides makes room for a more nuanced cultural history. The movement I trace from Pezeshkzad’s novel to Zoya Pirzad’s works is far from linear. Weaving through articulations of aspects of Iranian cultural memory and history in a popular song, a comic film, posters, and narratives of diaspora, the different realms and forms of representation I have chosen for my focus offer varied sites for disclosing and debating the very need for a shared and unified cultural sense of belonging. Opening up the category of culture and making room for the less lofty expressions of Iranianness might alleviate some of our collective anxiety about representing ourselves judiciously and well. My hope is to have demonstrated that even in our most apprehensive moments we are performing an embodiment of a culture we keep looking for outside ourselves. Iranian culture, as my study reveals, is multifaceted, transnational, and open to change.

Notes 1 The translation of Ashuri’s work from Persian is my own. 2 The translation is my own. 3 The term in Persian is olum-e ensani , which translates as the “human sciences.” 4 Ahmad Ashraf provides an excellent overview of the modern educational system in Iran in Encyclopaedia Iranica , 9 Dec. 2011. Web. 25 Dec. 2014.

Works cited Ashraf, Ahmad. “Education: General Survey of Modern Education.” Encyclopaedia Iranica , 9 Dec. 2011. Web. 25 Dec. 2014. Ashuri, Dariush. Ta ‘ rifha va Mafhim farhang . 4th ed. Tehran: Agah, 2010. Balibar, Étienne. Politics and the Other Scene . London: Verso, 2002. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia . New York: Basic Books, 2001. Dabashi, Hamid. Iran: A People Interrupted . New York: New Press, 2007. Dehkhoda, Ali-Akbar. “ Farhang .” Loghatnameh , n.d. Web. 25 Dec. 2014. Fischer, Michael M. J. and Mehdi Abedi. Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Post- modernity and Tradition . Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Fischer, Michael M. J. Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution . Cambridge, MA.: Har- vard U P, 1980. Googoosh. Q. Q. Bang Bang , Taraneh Enterprises, 2003. CD, DVD, Booklet.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader . Eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. London: Blackwell, 2006: 233–246. ———. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity . Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012: 1–17. Homayounpour, Gohar. Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2012. Marcus, George E. “A Broad(er)side to the Canon: Being a Partial Account of a Year of Travel among Textual Communities in the Realm of Humanities Centers, and Including a Collection of Artificial Curiosities.” In Rereading Cultural Anthropology. Ed. George E. Marcus. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1992: 103–123. Introduction 15 Maxx . Dir. Saman Moghadam. Hedayat Film Productions, 2005. DVD. Meskoob, Shahrokh. Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language . Washington DC: Mage, 1992. Mortazavi, Houman. Project Misplaced: The Rise and Fall of Simon Ordoubadi . Los Angeles: Printup Graphics, 2004. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. “Notes on the Definition of Persian Culture.” In Reza Ali Khazeni Memorial Lectures in Iranian Studies: The Gift of Persian Culture: Its Continuity and Influence in History. Ed. Peter J. Chelkowski. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2011: 19–35. Nyberg, H. S. A Manual of Pahlavi . Part II: Glossary. Otto Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, 1974. Pezeshkzad, Iraj. Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid . 2nd ed. Tehran: Safi Ali Shah, 1973. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Histori- ography . London: Palgrave, 2001. Shayegan, Daryush. Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West . Trans. John Howe. London: Saqi, 1992. Vahdat, Farzin. God and the Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse U P, 2002. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 1 Back to the future Time travel and Iranian identity

I begin with a contrapuntal reading of a comic novel of the pre-revolutionary period and the events that transpired on the political scene before the 1979 revolution. This reading is informed by Balibar’s concept of politics as inseparable from the other scenes, be they social, literary, or cultural, and subject to the processes of the imaginary. My aim is to reveal the “ambivalent imaginary” of the decades before the 1979 revolution represented in Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel. My hope is to expose not so much how literature becomes a site of resistance to the reigning political formation but rather how it uncovers the ambiguities, anxieties, and deni- als underpinning projections of Iranian identity at the individual and the national level. As will be seen in the conclusion of this chapter, many of these anxieties are alive and well in contemporary Iranian culture and behavior, including in my own life. The novel at the center of this chapter is Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid [Mashallah Khan at the Court of Harun al-Rashid], written by Iraj Pezeshkzad, a career diplomat during the reign of the second Pahlavi monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah. On the surface the novel does not engage the political scene and yet it offers a comic representation of Iranian preoccupations with rewriting history and the almost compulsive need to frame reality in terms of manipulated and ameliorated history. This is not the only novel in which Pezeshkzad tackles reinventions of history. His better-known novel, Dear Uncle Napoleon (1973), is about a low-ranking retired army officer who becomes consumed with reworking his military history and aggrandizing his own role in the nation’s struggle against foreign domination. The titular hero, Uncle Napoleon, gradually believes his own

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 fabrications, imagines himself at grave risk from the English, and succumbs to his fears. While Dear Uncle Napoleon provides more immediate possible allusions to the politics of the Pahlavi era, Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid makes no such obvious link. Nonetheless self-aggrandizement is at the core of Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid . Unlike Dear Uncle Napoleon , however, the novel’s protagonist, Mashallah, does exhibit some self-awareness, and while aspiring to reach beyond his means and abilities, he registers a reality against which his imagination must struggle. The contrast between the real and the imagined is underlined through Mashallah’s travels back in time. Tem- poral and geographic displacements create a contestation between a constructed Back to the future 17 national history that foregrounds a narrative of an unbroken and uncontaminated triumph of an “authentic” Iran and a more complicated history that acknowledges defeats, fragmentation, and transformation. The novel explores these disjunctures and highlights the folly of dreams of grandiosity, past and present. The novel’s focus on how history can be used as a platform for improving one’s self-image draws attention to other approaches to history in the Iranian cultural sphere and mirrors efforts under way in Iran of the 1960s and 1970s to project an image of the nation endowed with “3,000 years of Persian civilization,” as claimed by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in his Answer to History . Written in exile, the Shah’s autobiography of sorts reads as a compensation for a failed dream: “My country stood on the verge of becoming a Great Civilization.” In a remarkable act of denial, the Shah makes no mention of the revolutionary uprisings that took issue with his very idea of what constituted Iran’s civilization. As we shall see, the Shah’s own penchant for extravagant displays of what he saw as Iran’s cultural identity provided much fuel for the revolution. But even in hindsight, he finds the sources of the revolution outside Iran: “Part of the answer, I think, lies in the West’s lack of interest in Iran’s history and its failure to understand the differences between Persia, both ancient and modern, and itself” (34). Engaging in his own brand of time travel, the Shah taps into a remote past to reinvent an Iran that is modern and equal to the West. The grandeur barely disguises the anxiety about being proven inferior to the West. By reading the novel against this background I would like to illustrate how forms of disavowal1 of cultural history fueled imaginative explorations of what is denied a place in the past and the present. I conclude with my experiences of the workings of denial at the level of personal and collective memory. In the last decades before the 1979 revolution, Iran was subjected to a remarkable rearticulation of its cultural history. As part of this reworking of the national imaginary, Iran’s Islamic legacy was repudiated by many to align the nation with a pre-Islamic past, which served as a platform for the creation of a modern nation. The “official” and “public” manifestations of such disavowals provided fodder for the political opposition and gave rise to challenges to the institutions and authorities that called for the revised formulations of Iranian history and culture. Alongside political challenges that culminated in the 1979 revolution, there were other, seemingly less serious engagements, like Pezeshkzad’s novels. By playing with the discarded material of history, for instance, Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Harun al-Rashid shows the underside of this national narrative of grandeur. Those barred from or uninterested in the spectacle of the march toward the “Great Civili- zation,” this fictional narrative implies, could well find other means of projecting themselves into history or making themselves over in its mirror. This is not to suggest that Pezeshkzad’s novel is to be equated with acts of political opposition. But it highlights the mechanisms of disavowal at work in Iranian culture. First published in 1958 as a serial in Ettela ‘ at Javanan, a magazine intended for young adults, Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid was published again in 1971 in Ferdowsi magazine. The initial serialization of the novel in a magazine for the youth suggests both the work’s lightheartedness and a subtle hint 18 Back to the future that ambitious flights of fancy are more suitable for the domain of fiction than of history. In his 1958 preface, Pezeshkzad writes that the idea for a novel about time travel came to him in the course of a conversation with a friend. Following the European and American writers and filmmakers who had made travel to the past the subject of creative works, Pezeshkzad tells his readers, he decided to experiment with the idea in Persian. The novel narrates the story of a lowly bank guard, Mashallah, who travels back from twentieth-century Tehran to eighth-century Baghdad. At a literal level, the word mashallah in Arabic means “whatever Allah wills.” It is also used as an invocation against the evil eye as well as an expression of surprise and praise. The ordeals that Mashallah, the character, experiences during his journey to the past actualize all three levels of meaning embedded in his name, particularly his being subject to a will higher than his own even as he roams through a fantasy universe. Mashallah’s journey in time is instigated by his fascination with the ‘Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid, and his Iranian vizier, Ja‘far Barmakid, reputed to have been executed by the caliph for having had an affair with one of Harun’s sisters.2 The specific historical reasons for Ja‘far Barmakid’s execution are far from certain.3 But Pezeshkzad’s novel is less concerned with history than myths that sup- plant historical knowledge. In the first chapter of the novel we find out that Mashallah is taking night classes to prepare for his high school diploma exams and as part of his preparation he has been reading books of history and novels about the time of Harun al-Rashid.4 If the books are meant to focus Mashallah on his exams, they have not succeeded entirely. According to the guard who works with Mashallah, they have caused him to lose his grip on reality: “Sometimes like a madman he forgets his name, he forgets where he is and what he does” (7).5 In fact, Mashallah responds to queries by mistaking his boss, the bank manager, for Harun al-Rashid and mutters the name of Masrur, Ja‘far Barmakid’s reputed executioner. The narrator’s first description of Mashallah confirms Mashallah’s coworker’s reports to their boss:

In the guards’ room, near the bank entrance, Mashallah was sitting on a chair reading a book. Were someone to peer down and take a close look at his face, he would have easily grasped how the reading of the book had taken Mashallah so out of himself. His eyebrows, eyes, and mouth were in constant movement. Sometimes he would smile, sometimes frown. Occasionally his

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 face would redden and he would clench his teeth. It was evident that he was no more than thirty years old, but his moustache made him look a bit older. (8)

The transformation in Mashallah, which I have approximated in my translation of the Persian as “taken out of himself,” reads in the original as az khod bikhod kardeh and denotes a state of ecstasy such as that experienced by mystics in which one transcends the physical self and reaches a form of union with the divine object of longing. In common parlance, the expression takes on another, less lofty layer of meaning such as: to be beside oneself, to lose oneself, or to Back to the future 19 become overexcited. At this early stage of the narrative, this manner of describing Mashallah’s state of mind foreshadows a more radical loss of self, i.e., a journey that transforms him from an ordinary and insignificant bank guard to a visitor to the court of Harun al-Rashid where he is constantly confronted with adventures that test his mettle. The test Mashallah faces at his bank job is to remain alert and guard the bank against the imminent threat of robbery. Important as Mashallah’s charge might be, his preoccupation with reading and learning about the ‘Abbasid caliph and his vizier prevent him from attending to his duties. Even when the bank manager summons Mashallah into his office and warns him against reading books while on duty, Mashallah continues to lose himself in fantasy: “If this were Harun al- Rashid’s time, I would have been a somebody. I would have owned a harem. We would have gone into battle, we would have been a conqueror, taken booty, would have had dancers perform for me at night. . . . In those times whoever was an abler swordsman would have had better standing” (14). The change in pronouns from the first-person singular to the royal “we” underscores Mashallah’s tenuous hold on his immediate reality and his desire to slip into the imagined world based on his readings and to fantasize about elevating himself above his class and means. It is worth noting that Mashallah’s yearnings also reflect the humiliation he has suffered at the hands of the bank manager. As the manager dismisses Mashallah from his office, after delivering his warning, he welcomes his daughter, Maryam, a beautiful young woman, who Mashallah assumes has heard her father threatening to fire Mashallah if he fails to follow orders. The presence of this particular witness compounds Mashallah’s sense of shame: “Mashallah was a simple guard but he had his own dignity and pride. He sighed and blushed, recalling his deg- radation in front of this gorgeous woman whose beautiful countenance and body he had contemplated longingly. He said nothing more, lowered his head and left the boss’s office” (12–13). Like the imaginary harems of Harun’s time he dreams about, the bank manager’s daughter is beyond Mashallah’s reach. His class and economic and social standing disqualify him from courting Maryam, hence his longing adoration of her beauty. And little wonder that he retreats into a fantastical time. The ideal Mashallah imagines possible in the distant past, as we shall see, is severely tested when he finds himself in the Baghdad of the ‘Abbasid era. On his way home from the bank, lost in his imaginings, and still smarting from his boss’s admonition, Mashallah comes across an Indian yogi who advertises his

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ability to summon the spirit of the deceased. At the sight of Harun al-Rashid’s name on the yogi’s advertisement, Mashallah decides to hire the Indian’s services. While asking whether Harun and Masrur’s spirits can be summoned, Mashal- lah suddenly stumbles on the idea of himself being taken to them to “see how they live” (17), as if the novels and the histories have not given him a sufficient platform for displacing himself in “a different world” (7).6 His wish granted, Mashallah arrives in eighth-century Baghdad, where, being limited to Persian, he discovers he has no means of communicating with the locals except through a version of Arabic he makes up by relying mostly on Arabic borrowed words used in modern Persian. Not fazed by his linguistic shortcomings, Mashallah becomes 20 Back to the future focused on finding out whether he has arrived before Ja‘far has been executed. While the narrative does not explicitly state that his hope is to reverse the course of history and save Ja‘far, it leads us to believe that Mashallah hopes to forestall the execution of Ja‘far Barmaki,7 the vizier celebrated in Iranian history for the services he rendered to the ‘Abbasids and for his ultimate betrayal by them.8 Mashallah’s persistent inquiry, in his approximation of Arabic, of whether Ja‘far has been killed gives the locals the impression that he is looking for the famous Barmakid in order to assassinate him. As a result Mashallah is arrested and nearly himself executed. Ironically it is Ja‘far Barmaki who rescues his would-be savior from execution. Mashallah assumes that his ability to speak Persian saves his life, but his exchange with Ja‘far merely delays the execution and in fact makes him sus- pect in Ja‘far’s eyes. Not able to resist bragging to Ja‘far about what he knows, Mashallah drops hints that he is aware of Ja‘far’s affair with Harun’s sister. We learn in the novel that Harun gives his sister ‘Abbaseh in marriage to Ja‘far to enable Ja‘far to accompany him everywhere, including the women’s quarters. But Harun views the vows of marriage as a mere formality to circumvent the tradition that forbids men, unrelated or unmarried, to the women in the harem, to frequent their quarters. Unbeknownst to Harun, ‘Abbaseh and Ja‘far consummate their marriage and keep it a secret from Harun. Pezeshkzad’s novel recapitulates the popular belief that it was the discovery of this secret that led Harun to order Ja‘far executed. When Mashallah lets Ja‘far in on his knowledge of the illicit relationship between Ja‘far and ‘Abbaseh, Ja‘far delays the execution to discover who has hired Mashallah to spy on them. No sooner is Mashallah rescued from one ordeal than he tumbles into one life- threatening adventure after another, reminiscent of the Thousand and One Nights . Immediately after Ja‘far grants him a temporary reprieve, Harun al-Rashid agrees to pardon Mashallah on the condition that he kill a lion whose proximity to the harem has frightened the women of the palace. Because the most renowned lion slayer of Baghdad has failed, Harun is confident that Mashallah will not be able to meet the conditions of the bargain. Mashallah too doubts his ability to kill and deliver the lion to the caliph. Only his hunger makes him forget his fear. He demands some food before setting off in search of the lion. Mashallah’s feast is interrupted by the lion’s roar. Extreme panic does not rob Mashallah of the memory that his gun has made the journey back in time. But even the gun does not

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 give him enough courage to face the situation. With half-closed eyes and shaking hands, Mashallah randomly fires away and by chance kills the lion. Mashallah is saved against all odds. His own surprise at the unexpected outcome of his expedition reveals a curious mixture of his desire to abandon himself to his fantasy of elevating himself above his station by moving into the past and repeatedly coming up short even in this dream world. To live up to the terms set by the caliph, Mashallah sets out to deliver the felled lion to Harun’s palace. He mistakenly enters Harun’s harem, is discovered, and arrested again. This time the terms of his pardon are that he be castrated and become the chief eunuch in the palace. Mashallah narrowly escapes castration Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016

Figure 1.1 Cover of Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid 22 Back to the future by agreeing to a secret deal that allows him to pretend he has been castrated, play the role of the chief eunuch, and spy on Ja‘far Barmaki and ‘Abbaseh, Harun’s sister. The irony is not lost on Mashallah that instead of ending up with a harem of his own, he has to conceal his masculinity and suffer the humiliation of being considered a eunuch: “What a great time we had in Baghdad! . . . We came to have our own harem, now we are part of Mr. Akbar’s harem” (223). 9 Mashallah acts the part of the eunuch relatively well, even forgoing the moustache he is initially reluctant to shave off: “There was no hint of his moustache. He wore a very large red turban. On his turban a pair of scissors were embroidered in white thread. Under his loose cape an emerald-speckled sword drew attention and a sizeable diamond ring was visible on one of his fingers” (125). In addition to dressing the part of the chief palace eunuch, Mashallah is forced to embody a eunuch in other ways: “Straining to make his forehead and face appear wrinkled, eunuch Mashallah cleared his throat and spoke in a high and muffled voice” (125). The transformation Mashallah undergoes and his own wonder at its being diametrically opposed to what he had hoped for underscore a self-doubt that pierces through fantasy, betraying his anxieties about exhibiting sufficient manliness. In his fantasies, Mashallah appears to lose what Farzaneh Milani calls the “empowering veil of masculinity” and comes to embody “the Iranian man [who] has been imprisoned in and empowered by patterns of Mardanegi [manliness]” ( Veils 139). The fear of not measuring up and his less than optimal social and economic status seem to come dangerously close to overpowering his fantasy. Ironically Mashallah begins to dream of evading his fantasies, i.e., escaping the court of Harun al-Rashid. Bemoaning his fate, he thinks to himself: “I have to get a decent sum of money and flee this city. I will grow back my beard and moustache, change my name, and I will build a superb palace and a first-rate harem for myself” (129). The need for a disguise within his already disguised identity highlights the patterns to which Mashallah resorts even when he has already left “reality” behind. In fact, Mashallah excels in role-playing. For instance, he plays the part of the eunuch convincingly until one night he drinks too much wine in Harun’s company and gives himself away. Chased by Harun and his men, Mashallah manages to escape the palace with the help of an exceptionally unat- tractive palace beautician, Samiyeh, who demands to be married to Mashallah as a reward for saving his life. In the figure of Samiyeh we find the projection of Mashallah’s worst fears: a beautician who lacks beauty and a desiring woman

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 who gives free rein to her sexual appetite and does not play the part of the modest and submissive female. Mashallah now needs to escape Samiyeh’s clutches and devises a plan consisting of pretending to be the pregnant wife of an Iranian man, Akbar Irani. But Mashallah overplays the part in front of the guards, who take pity on the “woman in labor” and take him to ‘Abbaseh’s palace, where he could give birth under better care and also become wet nurse to ‘Abbaseh and Ja‘far’s child born in secret. This new disguise also requires Mashallah to hide his masculine identity. If during his last ordeal Mashallah had to confront losing his male identity and bearing visible markers of a lost masculinity, in this new embodiment as a pregnant Back to the future 23 woman, no trace of his manhood is permitted. Acknowledging this gradual era- sure of his masculinity, Mashallah continues to stage the identity demanded by his circumstances. The disguise works this time as well until Mashallah is forced to attend the women’s bath and he is once again discovered and faces the ultimate test: he is placed in a cell that leads on one side to Samiyeh and on the other to Harun’s pet lion. Rather than fall into the arms of the lustful and unsightly Samiyeh, Mashal- lah opts for being eaten by the lion. But inside the lion’s cage, he discovers that the lion is the lion’s keeper in disguise. Mashallah learns that after the lion died, his keeper was afraid to reveal the truth to Harun and instead concealed himself inside the lion’s skin, acting the part of the lion. In the lion keeper, Mashallah is faced with his own double: a lowly servant unable to face his duties and fanciful enough to resort to make-believe. Together the keeper and Mashallah come up with a plan to escape the predica- ment they share, and while the keeper goes for help, Mashallah takes his place inside the lion’s skin. On his return, the lion keeper explains his absence by claiming that he had been learning to train the lion to perform for the caliph. To prove the point, he proceeds to lead the lion, i.e., Mashallah, through a performance. Once again carried away with his acting, Mashallah ends up being punctured by one of the pins holding the lion skin in place on his rear end. The pain makes him forget his role and scream in his human voice. Mashallah escapes from the cage and runs to the women’s bath, where in the midst of his previous ordeal he had forgotten his gun. At last he is confronted with Harun’s men, but he lacks the courage to fire his gun. He acts only when he sees Samiyeh’s face in the mob headed in his direction. As in his confrontation with the lion, Mashallah closes his eyes and shoots haphazardly. The shots Mashallah fires mark the end of his trials in Baghdad and the beginning of his notoriety in Tehran. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself back at the bank. Unbeknownst to the daydreaming Mashallah, the shots he fires frighten bank robbers who have successfully infiltrated the bank, presumably while Mashallah was lost in his fantasies or traveling back in time. The shots startle the robbers, leading to their capture and Mashallah’s being hailed as a hero. In this new reality, which might well be another layer of fantasy in which his anxieties about himself are less evident, Mashallah finds himself at the center of the kind of attention he had been denied prior to his time travel. He overcomes class barri-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ers, and the bank manager develops a sudden liking for him and tries to convince Maryam that he would make a suitable husband for her:

My girl, for the hundredth time, let me repeat that there is no better and more suitable husband for you than this young man. I happen to know that you like him. Just set aside your haughtiness and pride! Isn’t he young, handsome, a member of the bank’s management team, from a good family? From the way he looks at you I can tell that he also likes you. The only thing you have to do is to try to woo him a little. (378–79) 24 Back to the future Mashallah’s remarkable reversal of fortune erases his earlier humiliation and transforms him from the one who longs for Maryam to her object of desire. What elevates Mashallah above his rank is his presumed act of bravery at the bank and his sporting a memento of his visit to Baghdad, a large diamond ring. The discovery of the ring leads to suspicions that he might have stolen it. It does not help that when Mashallah claims Harun gave the ring to him, a jeweler by the same name comes forward to reclaim it. No replacement for the ‘Abbasid ruler, this Haroun is a Jewish jeweler in Tehran. The suspicions do not dissuade the bank manager, who continues to pursue Mashallah as his future son-in-law. At last Mashallah is taken to court by the jeweler and in self-defense offers vignettes of his experiences at the court of Harun al-Rashid. In the final pages of the novel, the presiding judge calls for a recess, and the narrative ends before the trial is resumed. The novel ends abruptly with a shift in focus showing Mashallah arriving at the bank in a large chauffeured car in the company of young women whom he addresses in the same terms of endear- ment he used during his journey to Baghdad. This ending seems to suggest that Mashallah’s dream of being surrounded by women and gaining social status has been fulfilled or that he has entered a more fulfilling fantasy. The narrative also implies that Mashallah’s active cultivation of his fantasy is a catalyst to change. The suspicions against Mashallah and the possible theft of the ring prove irrelevant to the fulfillment of his desires. In his new “reality,” Mashallah has the kind of social approbation to recruit support from influential individuals like the bank manager. This despite the fact that he had clearly failed in his duties, allowing robbers to enter the bank, and has proven to be the same forgetful guard he had always been. Interestingly while roaming the court of Harun al-Rashid, Mashallah’s repeated blunders do not result in the kind of success his last slip-up garners him upon his return to his bank post. Having been promoted and given a handsome raise, Mashallah no longer needs to travel through time to escape his undesirable lot. With the help of his own imagination he overturns reality, or creates a new imagined reality, and convinces others that their attributions of valor and courage to him are real. What this tantalizing fictional representation offers up is the promise that indulging in the realm of fantasy and borrowing liberally from history could well displace reality. Even if Mashallah is not radically changed, others’ perception of him is sufficiently altered to give him a social makeover. In the realm of fiction, where the real can be suspended, Mashallah is a type,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 not unlike Cervantes’ seventeenth-century creation, Don Quixote, who becomes obsessed with tales of chivalry and attempts to replicate them in reality. In the context of Iran in the mid decades of the twentieth century, a literary type with grandiose and implausible ambitions resonates with what was taking place on the Iranian social, political, and cultural scenes. For example, the young Shah whose ascension to the throne was the handiwork of the Allied forces and the distrust of the Shah’s father and who was restored to power again in 1953 with American and British support came to believe his own imagined grandeur, ancestry, and might. Interestingly on the copyright page of the second edition of Pezeshkzad’s novel, there are echoes of Mashallah’s playing fast and loose with history in modern Back to the future 25 Iranian life. In fact, there is a spillage of time travel from the narrative onto Iran’s national calendar at the time of the publication of the second edition in 1976. The three sets of dates marked on this page follow two different calendars: the first two instances are in the Iranian solar calendar and indicate when the work was first serialized and subsequently published as a novel, 1337 (1958) and 1350 (1971), while the second printing is noted to have been in the year 2535 (1976). This last date, moving Iran from the fourteenth to the twenty-sixth century, marks a shift to the imperial calendar, instituted by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1976. The new calendar replaced the Iranian solar calendar’s point of origin that is linked to Iran’s Islamic heritage, the Prophet Mohammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina, with the beginning of the reign of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty (550–330 BC ). The calendar that had been in use in Iran prior to the introduction of the imperial calendar and was reinstituted before the 1979 revolution differed from the Islamic calendar primarily in that it is solar, while the latter is lunar. The Islamic and the Iranian calendars both begin with the Prophet Mohammad’s departure from Mecca to Medina, making Iran’s history coterminous with the beginnings of Islam. The imperial calendar dislodged this Islamic heritage and replaced it with the pre-Islamic legacy, which has had a gravitational pull on the Iranian imagination in the modern era. In The Life and Times of the Shah , Gholam Reza Afkhami traces the idea for the imperial calendar to Amir Asadollah Alam, who in 1967 during his term as minister of the interior had received an opinion from his director of legal affairs that “the calendar Irani- ans used was an Arab calendar and thus a disgrace; Iranians, he insisted, should own their own. The most appropriate event to be designated as the beginning of a truly Iranian calendar was the ascent of Cyrus the Great to the Iranian throne. The world would understand and applaud the choice because Cyrus was not only a great king but also the first king to bring forth a concept of human rights” (410–11). The anachronistic attributions evident in this judgment are part of a longer history of cultural reforms which Afshin Marashi, among other historians, analyzes in his Nationalizing Iran :

Through the discovery of philological scholarship and European historical writings on pre-Islamic Iran, radical reformers increasingly gained an appreciation of Iran’s ancient history. In their attempt to reform Iranian society and negotiate Iran’s entry into modernity, the pre-Islamic past became a con-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 venient template on which to reinvent Iranian culture in modern form. The discovery of modern values in the ancient Iranian past became a common literary and philosophical pattern among later-nineteenth and early twentieth- century Iranian intellectuals. Decidedly modern benchmarks of progress such as universal education, advanced scientific knowledge, and the equality of women were inscribed into the past as part of the attempt to reform and strengthen Iranian society in accord with the cultural demands of modernity. Nationalist intellectuals agitated to make this version of Iran’s past the official culture of the state, a reservoir of symbols to be shared by all Iranians. (136) 26 Back to the future This legacy, inherited by the last Shah, provided a fertile ground for the consolidation of Iran’s self-image. The road to the imposition of a calendar that propelled Iranians forward was preceded by the twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Persian empire. The 1971 celebrations, like the imperial calendar, were intended to dis- tinguish Iran from its Muslim neighbors and make the rest of the world take note of it. Afkhami quotes one of the organizers and a minister of culture, Mehrdad Pahlbod, saying “we wanted to tell the world who we are” (404). This need to be noticed and noted can be construed as an expression of national pride and, as illustrated by Marashi, must be placed in the context of a longer history of Iran’s encounter with modernity. It also reveals a remarkable investment in the construction and projection of a self-image based on a disavowal of the many complex aspects of the long history that was being celebrated. The way in which Iranian history was collapsed into an illusory narrative of continuous monarchy is illustrated in the pivotal event of the celebrations:

[. . . W]hat was most noteworthy about the spectacle at Persepolis was the speech the Shah made to launch the celebration. Standing before the unadorned stone tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire some two and a half millennia before, the Shah offered salutations to his ancient predecessor and declared before his assembled guests, and to his countrymen via radio and television, “Rest in peace, Cyrus, for we are awake and we will always stay awake.” (Marashi 3)

The Shah’s address to the long-dead king, much like Mashallah’s longing to find Ja‘far Barmaki, is founded on a basic recognition that neither Cyrus the Great nor Ja‘far can be brought back into reality. And yet this recognition is glossed over in the exercise of self-fulfillment. Similarly, in the fictional world inhabited by Mashallah, reality is suspended while he explores an alternative projected onto the past. In the case of the Iranian monarch, the past is sutured to the present. Standing in front of the tomb of Cyrus the Great was a graphic actualization of the imagined link between the Shah and the pre-Islamic king. This moment too had been in the making in both Iran’s modern history and the king’s own. In 1937, accompanying his father, Reza Shah, to the site of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Persepolis excavations, the then crown prince had already been exposed to the enormous possibilities offered by Iranian history. Eric Schmidt, a young German archaeologist educated at Columbia University, who led the University Museum archaeological expedition in Iran, describes the crown prince’s demeanor at the time of that visit: “H. I. H. 18, neat uniform of military school, sympathetic appearance, dignified in spite of his youth, standing usually at respectful attention behind his father” (qtd. in Gürsan-Salzmann 77). Schmidt also notes the attention the visiting royals pay to the imagined link between themselves and the history that is being excavated by Western archaeologists: “H. M. and H. I. H. were quite impressed, by the attractiveness of the entire relief and also by a certain Back to the future 27 parallelism: There was Darius and his son Xerxes, and the onlookers were again a king [Reza Shah] and his son” (78). In 1971, when he faced the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the Shah could be at once a reincarnation of the ancient Iranian legacy, disavow his own Islamic name, and stand apart from a long line of Muslim kings who had ruled the country in the intervening period. And yet those very dynasties were also invoked in what was called the “Parade of History,” which put on display each dynasty’s army in its distinct regalia. The simultaneous denial and recognition of the gaps and discor- dances in this representation of Iran and its monarch became evident in other aspects of the ceremonies. In yet another irony, in this grand celebration of Iran’s unique culture and history there was little hint of Iranian food:

Dinner was a six-course, five-hour extravaganza, created by the famed Max Blouet; much of it flown in from Maxim’s of Paris. It included fifty roast pea- cocks, “quail’s eggs stuffed with golden caviar, crayfish mousse, saddles of lamb.” The only thing Persian on the menu was the caviar. The Shah, allergic to caviar, was served a vegetable instead. (A. Milani 325)

The Shah’s food allergy oddly mirrors his dislike of much of the cultural legacy with which his subjects would have identified, including Persian food that would ideally have been served during the celebrations. But the idea of recruiting Iranian chefs, Afkhami reports, was discarded as “dangerous.” Afkhami cites the court minister Alam having rejected the idea “because they had no experience with serving appropriate food to so many heads of state, and it would be disastrous if anyone became ill” (Afkhami 407). The anxiety betrayed in the choice of the food to serve the dignitaries underscores both a fear of inadequacy and a deep investment in the need to be proven equal to the foreign guests for whom the performance is staged. The emphasis is heavily on the performance of an idealized Iranianness – and the performative, as in the fictional world of Mashallah’s attempts to pass himself off in the court of Harun al-Rashid, reigns supreme. From the point of view of sympathetic observers like Afkhami, this spectacle of history was a “great success” (411).10 He writes: “And the shah was pleased. The setting and the honors his peers accorded him validated what he considered his rightful place among them. The fact that he had been seen on television and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 movie screens around the world as he led sixty-nine heads and near heads of state in so many different functions was not to be taken lightly” (412). Afkhami’s recollection of the effect the celebrations had on the Shah highlights the centrality of the monarch’s sense of satisfaction and validation that is starkly in contrast with the displeasure some Iranians registered. He is reported to have defended the hefty cost of the extravaganza by retorting that he could not have served the dignitaries bread and radishes (Mottahedeh 327). The Shah’s rebuttal refocuses attention on the need to make the appropriate display of the self in order to sustain an image that gradually becomes conflated with reality. Ultimately the Shah paid a high price for his refusal to see beyond the “self-congratulating complacency of 28 Back to the future courtiers” (A. Milani 378) or to see himself from the perspective of critics who ridiculed him for “pos[ing] as the Cyrus of modern times” (ibid 207).11 The parallels between the 1971 celebrations and the fictional representation of Mashallah’s adventures offer interesting similarities in patterns of self-representation. It is striking that the television broadcasts of the celebrations are cited as important in the fulfillment of the Shah’s desires. Seeing himself be seen by others and performing the role he had scripted for himself legitimize him. His projections of himself, in other words, require a secondary fulfillment through being made visible and legible to others. Underwriting this masterful staging of the role of the monarch of a modern, historically rich nation is a disavowal of all facets of Iranian cultural traditions deemed inadequate to the performance. In contrast to the self-affirming qualities of the visual representations of the Shah, Mashallah’s projections of himself into the realm of fantasy keep coming up short. Even fantasy cannot compensate for the inadequacies he hopes to overcome through time travel. Mashallah’s relentless running away from one form of danger after another during his journey back to the ‘Abbasid court undermines the possibility of finding a safe refuge in the past. And yet his escapades allow him a measure of self-aggrandizement, albeit undercut with reminders of his misunderstandings and missteps. Misperception becomes the hallmark of Mashallah’s visit to Baghdad. For instance, when he is first captured and is being delivered to his execution, he thinks to himself: “Today must be either Harun al-Rashid or Ja‘far Barmaki’s audience. I guess they give their audience in the middle of a square. I have got to complain about these deputies to Ja‘far. Wow, what beautiful women! Too bad they wear face veils. But their uncovered eyes are truly beautiful!” (51). He begins to engage with the audience like a “famous champion boxer nearing the ring” (51) and receives such a positive response that he decides to perform a song for them on his reed flute. He chooses “Baba Karam,” a dance tune unrecognizable to the audience, accompanied with hip undulations and movements of the arms. The dance was originally performed by male dancers, but in its modern iterations it is also performed by women. Urging his audience to repeat the refrain, Mashallah makes a spectacle of himself. Moving from one performance to another, exchanging one disguise for another, Mashallah never has to face the consequences of his own actions, wishes, and desires. The sense of urgency that envelops his visit to Baghdad produces a constant deferral of sorts, making Mashallah’s fantasies mir-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ror his reality. At the bank, instead of attending to his duties as a guard, he loses himself in books about the time of the ‘Abbasids. In his travels to the court of Harun al-Rashid too, he gets further and further away from his goal of attaining fame and fortune and keeping an eye on Ja‘far Barmaki to forestall his execution. In this sense, on his journey into fantasy, his incapacity to face his longings and fears of inadequacy cannot be held back. As in a dream, Mashallah’s adventures in Baghdad are a projection, “an externalization of the internal process,” as Freud defined it (36). Unconscious impulses, anxieties, and fragments of daily life are intermingled in Mashallah’s encounters with the ‘Abbasids. Little wonder that the characters he comes across conform either to what he has read in popular history Back to the future 29 and fiction or to modern Iranian conjectures about the prominent role played by individuals of Iranian heritage in the history of Islamic civilization. In his imaginary return to ‘Abbasid Baghdad thus are reflected assumptions of Iranian superior know-how and the unacknowledged fear of being proven inadequate. This is particularly well grounded in Pezeshkzad’s use of modern Persian as the bridge between twentieth-century Tehran and eighth-century Baghdad. The issue of language – Mashallah’s ability to get by in Arabic, a language he does not know, and the faux pas he commits by relying on his native Persian – also underscores modern Iranian preoccupations with maintaining linguistic and ethnic/ racial distinctions from Arabs. In Mashallah’s linguistic infelicities we see an intersection of the nationalist discourses that fueled the belief in Persian having been contaminated by Arabic and the possibility of purifying new Persian from all ves- tiges of Arabic. This current is also part of the nation’s encounter with modernity. The debates about language too have a long history in early modern and modern Iranian cultural history. This history is inextricably linked with a colonial legacy that affected both Iran and Persianate India. The abolition of Persian as the official language of India in 1834 was purportedly based on its being an inadequate medium for communicating higher modes of knowledge (Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning 106). The response in India and Iran was to reform Persian:

With the nineteenth-century governmentalization of everyday life and the formation of the public sphere, Iranian bureaucrats recognized that a style of writing full of allusions and ambiguities was inappropriate for communication and popular politics. Bureaucrats and court historians, continuing a trend set by Indian Persophones, began to take pride in simple and comprehensible writing. Simple language meant de-Arabization and vernacularization of the Persian language. (107)

The desire to reform Persian is inseparable from the encounter with the West and the articulation of a modern national identity. At the intersection of nationalist and Orientalist discourses there developed a disavowal of Iran’s Islamic heritage that also took aim at the elimination of the Arabic alphabet. In this process as well, Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage was imagined as a point of origin that also held the promise of a future capable of rivaling European civilization.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 While Arabic was being vilified as the primary source of contamination of Per- sian, some basic elements of history were carved out of the national imaginary. Forgotten was the reality of the existence and use of several languages in ancient and pre-Islamic Iran. Also forgotten was the fact that the language that had emerged in the wake of the Islamic conquest of Iran was not identical to that used before the arrival of Islam. New Persian, more commonly known simply as Persian, refers to the language that eventually developed after the fall of the Sassanid empire, and it is written in the Arabic alphabet. Middle Persian, the language in use before the Arab conquest, did not survive “[b]ecause its cumbersome scripts were known only to a relatively small number of specialists” (Cooperson 9). The modern Iranian 30 Back to the future reenvisioning of this history does not acknowledge that the adoption of the Ara- bic alphabet might have facilitated development of the Persian language. In E. G. Browne’s words, “writing (and even reading) was probably a rare accomplishment amongst the Persians when the Pahlawi character was the means of written communication, save amongst the Zoroastrian magopats and dastabors and the professional scribes (dapir )” (9). Browne adds that the pre-Islamic Persian script “had no intrinsic merit save as a unique philological puzzle [. . .] and, once deprived of the support of religion, ancient custom, and a conservative priesthood, it could not hold its own against the far more legible and convenient Arabic character” (10). At the height of Pahlavi power, such inconvenient aspects of history were transformed into sources of pride. The family name Reza Shah adopted, Pahlavi, brought back into modern circulation the script and the language of the last pre-Islamic Iranian empire. His son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sustained this willful neglect of history and maintained that Arabs found much to borrow from the conquered Persians. This is how the last Shah of Iran writes about that chapter of Iranian history:

When it is remembered that it was thanks to so-called Arab translations that Europe, from the twelfth century was to regain her knowledge of the great Greek texts, it can perhaps be claimed that there would have been no Euro- pean Renaissance – or that it would have been quite different – without the work and much earlier example of the Persians, which the Arabs copied with such brilliance. (38)

By the time the Shah wrote this in 1981 he had lost his throne and was living in exile. Nevertheless he clings tenaciously to a “history” that glorifies pre-Islamic Iran and the concept of monarchy as integral to Iranian culture. The effort to maintain the distinct features of Iranian civilization is refracted and reflected in Pezeshkzad’s novel and is interestingly focused on Mashallah’s perception of the racial and linguistic differences between the Iranians he meets at the court of Harun al-Rashid and the native Arabs. The first striking instance of the visible and aural difference is when Mashal- lah meets Ja‘far. Overcome with joy, Mashallah stares at Ja‘far: “Ja‘far Barmaki was a shapely man with big eyes, not too bushy eyebrows, and fair complexion which distinguished him from the rest” (60). The Ja‘far Barmaki of Mashallah’s

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 imagination is naturally not as swarthy and hairy as the Arabs, who were presumed to be racially different from Persians. Myths of Iran’s “Aryan” origins, propagated by the German Orientalist Ernst Herzfeld,12 among others, had gained wide currency during the time of Reza Shah, the last Shah’s father, who found cultural, economic, and political common ground with Nazi Germany.13 The fictional depiction of Ja‘far Barmaki echoes the legacy of an era in which historians and archaeologists provided the material for confirmation of Iranians’ racial purity and similarity to Europeans:

Informed by European fascism, racial and linguistic purity were the key elements of the national and cultural revivalism of the 1920s and 1930s. The Back to the future 31 enthusiasm for the “renewal of ancient glory” [. . .] was coupled with anti- Arab zealotry, a distinctly Iranian form of anti-semitism. The nostalgia for a pure pre-Arab past and Aryan spirit informed the literary, historical, and political imaginaries of those decades. (Tavakoli-Targhi, “Narrative Identity” 113)

Afshin Marashi sees this desire to measure up to the West as more inclined toward demonstrating Iran’s compatibility with “new universalism of modernity” (129) and capable of contributing to “world civilization” (130). The demoniza- tion of Arabs, by extension, would have facilitated the establishment of a national tradition stripped of associations with Islam. Reclaiming a pre-Islamic past, as Talinn Grigor demonstrates, entailed a process of both creation and destruction. In the domain of architecture: “For the modernists [. . .] the control over the physical and conceptual ‘heritage’ enabled them to erase the immediate past to construct the ‘progressive’ future. Destruction of building-as-representation proved central to the construction of the pending utopian future” (18). By the time Pezeshkzad came to his imaginative engagement with Iran’s self- image, the idea of racial difference had become normalized14 and had extended to others, like Indians, who ironically had shared a linguistic and cultural legacy with Iran. In the realm of the novel, we are confronted with this in Mashallah’s meeting with the yogi: “The yogi spoke Persian with a bizarre accent and unlike other yogis was a little corpulent, but his bronzed (literally burnt) complexion attested to his national authenticity” (16). Not surprisingly, Mashallah’s preoccupation with markers of racial, linguistic, and national difference are transposed onto the ‘Abbasid court. The most difficult challenge Mashallah faces in his fantastical encounter with eighth-century Baghdad is lacking a common idiom. In this imaginative recre- ation of the ‘Abbasid era, the Arabs and the Persians of the time would not have known each other’s languages. As Cooperson reveals, this assumption is ques- tionable: “In Baghdad, which has been built near the former Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon, many people (including, in all probability, al-Ma‘mun) were more or less bilingual in Persian and Arabic” (9). The world into which Mashallah is transported is clearly divided along ethnic and linguistic lines. In the Baghdad of the ‘Abbasids, before Mashallah recognizes his changed reality, the narrator signals a change in his dress code: “This man who

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 was about thirty years old wore a turban and a long robe. The only things that distinguished him from the rare passersby were the absence of a long beard and a triangular object hanging from his belt. He held a couple of books under his arms and looked around him with surprise” (19–20). The surprise is redoubled when Mashallah addresses the first person he encounters in Persian, but has to resort to body language: “When the stranger realized that the old man had not understood him, he repeated his question while emphasizing words, pointing to the ground, and gesticulating” (20). That Mashallah is out of his element is signaled by the narrator referring to him as the “stranger” in Baghdad. In fact, it does not take long for Mashallah to recognize his own estrangement. In his next encounter, Mashallah replaces this language of gestures with his own concocted Arabic, and 32 Back to the future by his third encounter he follows his greetings with first the Persian utterance “Excuse me, sire, I am a stranger in this city” with “an al-gharib” (25). His Arabic phrase consists of the first person singular pronoun in Arabic followed by the Persian borrowed word for stranger “gharib” preceded by the definite article “al.” When he discovers that the reed flute he had bought the day before has made the journey, he thinks: “It’s a good thing I didn’t forget my reed flute. Whenever I get lonely I will play it a bit. It will remind me of the water and earth of my home country” (26). In the original Persian the concept of homesickness is emphatically grounded to one’s own “water and earth,” an expression associated with longing for one’s home. Mashallah is relieved to be able to speak Persian with Ja‘far and the few Ira- nians he meets in Baghdad, but his spoken Persian and his being from a time unknown to them raise some challenges. Ja‘far addresses Mashallah as “javan-e irani” (young Iranian” and asks him if he comes from Khorasan, the region where the ‘Abbasids first consolidated their rule. When his captors initially interrogate Mashallah, he pretends to be from Khorasan. In his meeting with Ja‘far, whom he identifies as a fellow countryman, he attempts to clarify his origins: “No, sir. I said I was from Khorasan because of all the cities, they know only Khorasan. I went to Khorasan once some seven or eight years ago and made a pilgrimage” (63). Forgetting that Tehran did not exist at Ja‘far’s time, Mashallah proceeds to tell him that he comes from Tehran. Their common language does not help them overcome the gap in their knowledge of a country suspended across two historical periods. At last Mashallah cites the ancient city of Rey, familiar to Ja‘far, and settles on claiming that he comes from its environs. In similar manner, the site of pilgrimage Mashallah mentions in Khorasan did not yet exist when Ja‘far was alive. In fact, the site of pilgrimage he mentions, the shrine of the Shi‘ite Eighth Imam is part of the repertoire of Iranian grievances against the ‘Abbasids. Harun al-Rashid’s son and successor, al-Ma’mun, is believed to have selected al-Riza as his own successor and was traveling with him to Baghdad when al-Riza dies. In Shi‘ite cultural history, it is forgotten that al-Ma’mun had selected a successor from a rival family, hoping to reconcile the ‘Abbasid and Alid animosity over which family was the right one to succeed the Prophet Mohammad. Upon his death, Imam Reza, as he is known in Iranian history, was buried in Khorasan, and his tomb became a popular site of Shi‘ite pilgrimage. In Shi‘ite tradition, Reza is believed to have been murdered by the ‘Abbasid caliph.15

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Having embarked on correcting history and saving Ja‘far from execution, Mashallah is not particularly mindful of details and sometimes even shows little understanding that his spoken Persian would be markedly different from the Per- sian spoken in the Baghdad of Ja‘far’s time. The other Iranian character that becomes pivotal in Mashallah’s adventures is Akbar Irani, who is the clergyman recruited to marry Mashallah and Samiyeh. Mashallah discovers Akbar’s Iranian origins when in his desperate attempt to forestall the marriage, Mashallah finds him alone and addresses him in his gibberish Arabic. It is because Mashallah’s Arabic is filled with Persian words that Akbar asks him if he is Iranian, leading to the discovery that they can speak to Back to the future 33 each other in Persian. They strike a deal and Mashallah hires Akbar as a servant. As they review the terms of service, Mashallah demands corrections to Akbar’s Persian. When Akbar answers with an archaic word for “yes,” Mashallah con- fuses the old “ari” with the modern transformation of it to “areh” which is not sufficiently formal (coming across something like “yeah”). Mashallah tells Akbar that as his servant, he must show deference in his choice of words and use a different word. The second linguistic correction Mashallah demands of Akbar is “don’t talk like this, like Tehran theaters. Talk like I do” (199). Not able to conceive of archaism, Mashallah forges ahead and demands, contradicting his first condition, that Akbar stop speaking in what sounds like formal, stage Persian. This is a particularly paradoxical position for Mashallah to adopt, since his visit to Baghdad has consisted of staging one identity after another. But in his performances he maintains a sense of self that does not stray far from his “reality” situated in twentieth-century Iran. The incompatibility between his desire to live at a time that would allow him to own his own harem and to be part of his own time and place remains unresolved, mirroring the impossible conjectures about the past and the present sustained in modern Iranian history. Mashallah shares in the national myth of racial distinction and superiority compared with Indians and Arabs. His imagination allows him to go back in time, negotiate with Harun al-Rashid by stringing together borrowed Arabic words used in Persian, and overcome adversity. In this compensatory dreamlike encounter with the Arab and Islamic civilization, Mashallah gains the upper hand. He exits the daydream relieved to be returned to the Iran of his own time, unwittingly having become a heroic figure. This fulfillment of his dreams is brought about through the displacement of his own shortcomings onto the Arabs he meets. The temporal differences give Mashallah an edge, if only in terms of his knowledge of the course of history. But even this sense of security is tempered by Mashallah’s apparent lack of control over his own fate. Once he is caught up in the currents of the ‘Abbasid era, he too is vulnerable and has to rely on his own ability to extract himself from life-threatening situations. As we have seen, he is repeatedly rescued by sheer chance and not his own skill or know-how. The narrative constantly undercuts his presumed superiority over the Arabs. Thus the myth of the radical differences between Arabs and Iranians is shown to falter. As Reza Zia-Ebrahimi demonstrates, Iran’s flirting with the Aryan discourse “allowed a simplistic reading of history along racial lines, and most importantly, it gave Iranian national-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ists the impression that they were racially equal to Europeans” (472), seemingly overcoming a deep-seated inferiority complex. Pezeshkzad’s novel exposes elements of this inferiority complex by making his readers laugh at the foibles of a bank guard as the story lays bare the penchant to imagine Iranian identity as stable across time. Because of the novel’s entertaining and lighthearted nature, such a critique appears as less challenging. It could also be dismissed out of hand for the context in which it appears. But what provides Pezeshkzad with material for his novel circulates in other, more serious forms of cultural expression and might prove irrefutable because of the context and form in which it is presented. We have seen the manner in which the Iranian sovereign drew on “discovered” 34 Back to the future knowledge about Iran’s pre-Islamic past to represent his nation as distinct from its Arab and Muslim neighbors. By way of conclusion here, let me adduce a useful example: the late Shahrokh Meskoob’s essays collected under the title Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language. An intellectual and scholar displaced by the 1979 revolution, Meskoob explains in the preface to the Persian edition that the impetus for the essays was a discussion he attended in Paris, where he moved after the revolution, on the subject of “Language, Nationality, and Autonomy.” Surprised by the participants’ lack of knowledge about the Persian language and the history of its development, Meskoob felt a compelling need to provide an antidote in the form of an historical overview. He offers an interesting understanding of his method:

On the basis of the inference I draw from history, or rather, from truth in general (and here “sociohistorical truth”), my study is more in the nature of a proposal in the sense of suggestive juxtaposition, of sketching the subject and presenting issues (sometimes only hypotheses) which may stimulate reflection and perhaps shed light on the issues. In the course of this book I hope to communicate to readers my sense of “historical truth.” For the moment, suffice it to say that what I am presenting to readers is primarily an invitation to reflect on a corner of Iranian cultural history and to rethink that cultural history, nothing more, and not the exposition of facts which a writer might consider certain and indisputable. My remarks are conceptions about truths, not necessarily truth itself. (28)

Setting himself apart from a chronicler of facts, Meskoob embarks on a path he sees as beneficial to his compatriots: “It will be strange if the Islamic Revolu- tion of 1978–79 does not [. . .] stimulate Iranians to return to their own history and reexamine the past from the vantage point and behind the windowpanes of the present” (34). Interestingly the “windowpanes of the present” are endowed with the capacity to bring into focus selected segments of the past or to allow the observer selective powers of observation. Meskoob’s emphasis on the urgency of the need to reexamine Iranian history stems from his own displacement and sense of rupture that he deftly maps onto a collective past:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 [. . .] after suffering defeat at the hands of the Arabs and after converting to Islam, the Iranian people also returned to the past. They turned back from one great historical event to history. Like Arabs, Iranians were now Muslims, but they had a different language. In the tenth century, when they organized their own first regional governments and concomitantly wrote and composed poetry in their own language, they assumed the characters of a discrete and independent people or nation. They were well aware of this fact. After four hundred years, when all other means and attempts to secede from Arab domination had failed, Iranians turned to history, some with the aim of secession from Islam as well. For their own preservation as a separate nation, they Back to the future 35 returned to their own history, and took a stand in the stronghold of their language. They turned to two things that differentiated them from other Muslims. (34–35)

Meskoob’s exile from an Iran that has declared itself an Islamic Republic is analogous to the alienation he describes among the inhabitants of the Iranian plateau after the defeat of the Sassanid empire at the hands of the Arabs. Despite their having embraced Islam, Meskoob demonstrates, they maintained their dis- tinctness from other Muslims. Meskoob invites his readers to engage in the same reenvisioning of history he ascribes to the Muslim Iranians of the seventh century. Following his methodology, Meskoob can hardly be faulted for his glossing over details of history. Presumably for the purposes of historical research we can and will turn to historians who would offer counterclaims such as Gnoli’s: “The historical development of the idea of Iran is, in actual fact, complex and far from being straightforward. Suffice it to mention the part played by the Mongols and, in any case, by non-Iranian ethnic groups. And a perspective based on a presumed opposition between Arabs and Iranians would be equally erroneous” (Gnoli 182). But Meskoob is not interested in historical accuracy and, as we have seen, is embarked on his own brand of “historical truth.” His essays are meant to recall the patterns along which a sense of collectivity was preserved through the medium of language and to appeal to Iranians who appear to have lost sight of the lessons of history. Ending his book on a brief discussion of the Constitutional Revolution, Meskoob concludes with this plea and warning: “For nearly a century [literary intellectuals and writers] have shouldered the burden of nurturing Iranian nationality and the Persian language. One can only hope that they prove capable of leading Persian language to its next stage and the fate of the language and the people who speak it is better tomorrow than it is today” (191). The need to return to the past to secure a “better” future for Iran echoes the process by which Mashallah improves his lot and advances his status. What captures Mashallah’s imagination are Persian translations of historical fiction written in Arabic – the language Meskoob and other Iranian intellectuals and nationalists have long resisted acknowledging as part of a common cultural legacy. The movement from Arabic into Persian, represented in the translations of the popular historical novels Mashallah reads, is a reminder of the contrapuntal movement among Persian, Arabic, and Greek that contributed to a burgeoning in poetry and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 sciences, as well as the other arts. The Iranian nationalist obsession with Iran’s distinction from Arabs insists on a forgetting of the rich legacy of linguistic and cultural exchange across time and place. This vision tolerates spatial and temporal displacements of a very different nature. In Pezeshkzad’s comic rendition, the mining of historical past becomes a pas- time not only of the elite and the intellectuals but also of an ordinary Iranian catching up on his education at night. In contrast to the sovereign and the intellectual elite engaged in the reinscription of history, Mashallah is willing to play the part of the fool. His playing the role of the clown allows the reader glimpses of the flawed nature of his quest. His comic stumbling along the path of self-reinvention 36 Back to the future is in sharp contrast with the lofty and serious goals of his compatriots dedicated to creating a modern nation. Although for Mashallah history and historical “truth” are also tools for self-amelioration, his flights of fancy do not completely erase his profound feeling of inadequacy. In Mashallah Khan’s case, what has been disavowed comes back repeatedly to haunt his fantasy. Temporal and geographic displacement take him outside of himself but he ends up fleeing this other realm. An imagined ideal proves to be haunted by repressed fears and anxieties, not unlike the dream of a modern Iran built on the shaky foundation of the disavowed past. In the process of working through Pezeshkzad’s novel and the rewritings of history and reality, I have been reminded of a particularly difficult moment in my own life, when a painful reality, found untenable and denied, was supplanted by a concocted story. Almost three decades after the fact I can now look back on it in a new light and better grasp its creative dimension. When my father died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 56, my mother decided not to tell me and my sister, who were studying abroad, and she forbade our relatives to reveal the truth to us. The initial shock might well be attributed to my mother’s denial of a loss she could not comprehend and contain. But the lie she fabricated to protect her daughters needed to be sustained and embellished, particularly in response to our queries and demands for information about our father. In the midst of her own grief she continued to spin stories about our father having been sent to the war front and, when we pressed her for news from him, she told us that he was able to send letters but could not make phone calls. It made no sense whatsoever that a dentist would be needed at the front. Naturally we became ever more suspicious and called cousins and other relatives, who backed up our mother’s story. My mother enforced her version of the truth for four months. In the end it was my sister who told me about our father’s death, who herself had been told by her husband. The elaborate channels of communication, the cast of intermediaries, and the complex web of stories successfully postponed my sense of loss, primarily by keeping me caught up in the unfolding of the plot devised by my mother. The only emotion I did not feel when I was told that my father had died four months earlier was grief. My anger and incomprehension also prevented me from grasping all manifestations of how my mother had dealt with her grief. She created a story in which our father was alive, although her immediate reality was a constant reminder of her loss. Denial can be seen as having fueled her fabrications, but I also see a connection between my mother’s denial

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 and her secret desire to have been a writer. Interestingly the way she revealed her desire to be a writer was also embedded inside another narrative, this time of a humorous nature. The conversation she reported to me later took place when my mother was visiting two female relatives in the US. One evening the three women sat and chatted amiably, reminiscing about their past. One of them wondered what they would wish to become if they had another life to live. My mother did not have to think long and replied: “If I had another life to live, I would become a writer.” In her reporting of the exchange, my mother did not make her choice the center of the story but rather one of the women’s outrageous desire to come back as a Back to the future 37 prostitute. The rest of the anecdote, as told by my mother, was focused on how they laughed and challenged the woman who had spoken her desire, reminding her of the hardships of a prostitute’s life. My mother’s telling recreated the hilarity they had enjoyed, underlining her gift for storytelling. What I wanted to say at that moment was that she had realized her dream by becoming a very capable storyteller and she had already exhibited the powers of her imagination in the fiction she created to keep our father alive for her daughters and herself. One of the reasons I did not compliment my mother on her talents is deeply connected to a recognition that in hiding the truth of my father’s death, my mother was not without predecessors. As a cultural trope her actions were an extension of protectiveness. The taboo against announcing the death of a loved one without first setting the stage and preparing the recipient is widely acknowledged. When a cousin passed away, a relative called from Tehran to offer her condolences and in the course of our conversation suggested that I begin preparing my mother for the news by first telling her that my cousin was not well. She did not need to tell me the next steps in this ritual. I knew what was expected, but all I could think about was the joke one of my cousins told me when I vented to him about my mother hiding the fact of my father’s death from me. Instead of offering the empathy I had hoped for, he laughed and told me this joke. A young man hears of a friend’s relative’s death and rushes to offer his condolences and breaks the news to the friend. Upset by his friend’s bluntness, the friend counsels him to be more mindful next time he has to break such bad news to someone. The young man asks for guidance and his friend gives him an example. He says, “Let us say that someone wants to tell you your favorite cat fell off the roof and died. This is what you do. First you approach your friend by asking about his cat’s health. Then you tell him that recently you saw his cat going up to the roof terrace but he looked healthy and seemed to negotiate the steps well. You give your friend time to absorb this before saying that you also saw him make it up to the terrace and walk along its edge with his gaze fixed on a bird. Again you follow up by saying how well the cat looked. You let some time pass before telling your friend that the cat started chasing the bird and during the frantic chase the cat slipped and fell, but fortunately he fell only partway and managed to land on the staircase leading up to the terrace. Only when sufficient time has elapsed, next time you approach your friend to tell him that apparently the cat’s landing was not so soft and that he broke some bones, but fortunately the cat was patched up by the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 vet and was resting. At long last, after you have allowed your friend to get used to the idea that his cat is not in good health, you break the news of his cat’s death by saying that the doctors tried to save the cat when he developed an infection but to no avail.” Well educated in the art of the gentle breaking of bad news, the young man thanks his friend and the two part ways. Some months later, he hears that the same friend’s grandmother in another city has passed away. He visits his friend and after exchanging some pleasantries, he asks about the friend’s grandmother. When the friend replies that the last time they spoke, his grandmother was doing well, the young man says: “I saw your grandmother climbing the stairs to the rooftop terrace.” 38 Back to the future I was then and still am struck by the will to manipulate and alter reality to make it more palatable. The joke was my cousin’s way of justifying my mother’s decision and actions and the relatives’ collective consent to play along. As if to remind me of its appeal, I was recruited into practicing it myself. When a close cousin passed away, I was asked by his sisters not to reveal his death to his mother and mine, both elderly and fragile and presumably incapable of sustaining the shock and grief. At first I was persuaded by the desire to protect loved ones, but the daily dissimulation, vigilance, and control of communications with my mother proved exhausting and made me angry that I was being prevented from experiencing my own grief and doing unto my mother as she had done to me. Breaking my promise, I told my mother and explained why I had delayed the announcement of my cousin’s death. Her calm acceptance, I assumed, would persuade my cousins that they too could tell their mother. Instead one after another they reiterated why they were convinced of their handling of reality. One cousin in particular was not pleased with my approach. “She should not have found out” and “I wish you had not told her,” she let me know. Unsurprisingly she was entertaining the possibility of recruiting someone who sounded like their brother to make occasional telephone calls to their mother. But how long could the real be suspended in favor of an ameliorated staging? Did the subterfuge soften the blow of losing a brother? Could the performance become confused with and dislodge the real? This is the same tendency Iraj Pezeshkzad explores in his Dear Uncle Napo- leon . The stories Uncle Napoleon fabricates to cover his feelings of inadequacy seep into his reality, and his own stories convince him that he is a potential target for the British. Uncle Napoleon’s fantasies become so real that, fearing for his life, he is persuaded to write a letter to Hitler and ask for protection. Goaded on by a relative with a grudge, Uncle Napoleon proposes a secret password for phone calls to be placed by Hitler’s agents to pass on crucial information to Uncle Napo- leon. A phone call is made to Uncle Napoleon to keep this fiction alive, and we laugh at his gullibility. And yet we do not identify with Uncle Napoleon but rather the clever relatives who feed his illusions and take steps to affirm and sustain them. What is entertaining in the comic novel strikes me as not unlike searching for someone willing to impersonate a dead cousin. One is coded as comic and the other as tragic. But there appears to be a disidentification with the fictional character whose delusions we do not associate with our own creative representations of reality. What separates the two is the assumption of superiority and deliberate

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 manipulation of the stuff of reality. The loss of self-awareness is the threshold separating us from the types depicted in Pezeshkzad’s novels. But characters like Mashallah Khan complicate this assumption of self-possession and knowledge. Mashallah Khan’s fantasies bear traces of his anxieties and color his imaginative exploits in Baghdad. The ending of the novel could be seen as a fulfillment of his desires, but it could also be interpreted as Mashallah’s entry into another realm of his imagination. The ambiguous ending of the novel further blurs the boundary between reality and fantasy. The flights of fancy that take place within the framework of fiction are easier to dismiss than a monarch’s belief that he had single-handedly charted a new course for his nation and that what he called Back to the future 39 the “Revolution of the Shah and the People” would seal Iran’s fate as a modern nation. That the revolution he instigated in 1963 might have had any link to the 1979 revolution escaped him long after he had been deposed tells us about the powerful hold denial has had in modern Iranian self-understanding. The projection of the image of a modernized country capable of emulating and surpassing its Western counterparts papered over anxieties and ambivalences associated with that image. If the meal served visiting heads of state on the occasion of commemorating twenty-five hundred years of monarchic rule had to be flown in from Paris, a clay object, the Cyrus Cylinder, dating from 539–530 BC , could be anachronistically declared the first charter of human rights,16 regardless of the evidence that it “reflects a long tradition in Mesopotamia where, from as early as the third millennium BC , kings began their reigns with declarations of reforms” (MacGregor). The appeal of restorative nostalgia of the decades before the revolution did not dissipate with the end of monarchic rule. As we will see in the next chapter, Iranian cultural memory of the revolution and the formation of a new theocratic state are sites of contention.

Notes 1 The concept of disavowal, also referred to as denial or denegation, has its roots in Freud’s writings about psychic defense mechanisms. Laplanche and Pontalis trace the term to Freud “in the specific sense of a mode of defense which consists of the subject’s refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception” (118). As André Green points out in Time in Psychoanalysis , “the relation between repression and the other defenses became less clear.” I am particularly interested in Freud’s discovery that the “ego is unconscious of its own defences, in other words, that repression remains in place even when an interpretation, however correct, has been given.” Equally relevant to my analysis is that the “intellectual acceptance of the repressed leaves the latter intact” (Green 104), making it possible for “something [to be] affirmed in the same gesture that it is denied” (Wright 70). 2 In his Harun al-Rashid and the World of the Thousand and One Nights , André Clot writes: “The popular imagination seized on the appalling manner of Jaffar’s death and quickly invented romantic explanations arising more from sentiment than from accuracy. These were adopted by contemporary historians and have been echoed by writers and storytellers ever since” (90). 3 Michael Cooperson addresses these uncertainties in his Al-Ma ‘ mun. 4 The writer specifically named in the novel is the prolific Lebanese Jurji Zaydan, who published over twenty historical novels, some of them focused on the reign of Harun al-Rashid. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 5 All translations from the original Persian are my own. 6 In his report to their boss, Mashallah’s coworker uses these words to describe Mashal- lah’s state while on duty. 7 When referring to the fictional character in Pezeshkzad’s novel, I will adopt the rendering of the name in Persian and refer to Harun al-Rashid’s vizier as Ja‘far Barmaki. 8 The Barmakids who served as secretaries of the ‘Abbasid administration are seen in Ira- nian popular history as the saviors and transmitters of pre-Islamic Iranian legacy and as the true backbone of the ‘Abbasid caliphate. Their knowledge and know-how are cited as the source of the ‘Abbasid success. Aspects of this popular history are endorsed by scholars. For example, in Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Dimitri Gutas writes: “The Barmakids, with their unquestioned supremacy in these posts [secretaries] for the first 40 Back to the future half-century of the ‘Abbasid dynasty, were naturally carriers of Sasanian practice and along with it of the concomitant culture of translation” (128). The ‘Abbasids and the Barmakids had enjoyed close familial ties as well. In Al-Ma ‘ mun , Michael Cooperson writes: “The ‘Abbasids and the Barmakis had for two generations followed the custom of nursing each other’s children, a practice that created bonds of kinship between the caliphs and their advisers” (17). But the extent of the Barmakid influence has to be measured against the more complex history of the ‘Abbasids. For instance, as Gutas points out, the transfer of the seat of power from Damascus to Baghdad meant that the ‘Abbasid rulers were exposed to a variety of religious and cultural traditions and forms of knowledge: “Away from Byzantine influence in Damascus, there developed a new multicultural society in Baghdad based on the completely different demographic mix of population in Iraq. This consisted of (a) Aramaic-speakers, Christians, and Jews, who formed the majority of the settled population; (b) Persian-speakers, concentrated primarily in the cities; and (c) Arabs, partly sedentarized and Christian [. . .] and partly nomadic [. . .]” (19). 9 In a conference paper devoted to this novel, Michael Cooperson reads this episode in light of Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards , as an instance of the sexual anxieties of Iranian modernity. Mashallah’s embodying a modern Iranian male identity, Cooperson argues, reactivates a memory of the loss of masculinity that accompanied the nation’s embrace of modern European concepts of gender and sexuality. 10 A. Milani offers a different view and points to ominous signs during the opening of the celebrations. He writes: “As the Shah began to speak – telling Cyrus that he ‘could repose in peace for we are awake’ – his unusually tremulous voice proved no match for the sandstorm and heavy winds that were suddenly unleashed” (338). 11 This is a citation from a letter sent in 1958 by John Foster Dulles, who was then US secretary of state, to Selden Chapin, the American ambassador to Tehran. 12 In her “Excavating Zarathustra: Ernst Herzfeld’s Archaeological History of Iran,” Jennifer Jenkins reveals: “In 1935 Nazi academics denounced [Herzfeld’s] sympathy toward Iranian history and culture as the mark of a non-Aryan worldview. The Nazi government stripped his professorship from him, and he traveled into exile, first to Great Britain and then to the United States” (2). 13 In The Idea of Iran, Gherardo Gnoli analyzes the sources and the evidence Herzfeld deployed in the development of his thesis that the Achaemenid inscriptions referred to the territory ruled by the kings as “the empire of Aryans” and indicates that “the great German archeologist was doing no more than confirming an opinion that he had already voiced” (1). He concludes: “We must refer the invention or fiction that were [ sic] characteristic features of the birth of the idea of Iran to the ideology rather than to the reality of the historical process” (183). 14 Houra Yavari also addresses the role writers and intellectuals played in the creation and affirmation of a nationalist discourse founded on the ideas propagated in the early twentieth century: “An imaginary perception, or rather an aesthetisized pre-Islamic myth, was [. . .] discursively achieved. The intellectuals of the period turned to this Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 myth to produce a literature that allowed its readers to participate in the shared narrative of a glorified and unifying past. One of the prominent achievements of this discourse was the insertion of the story of ancient Persian in the master narrative of Western nations, which enabled the period’s elites to think of themselves as blessed with a unique pre-Islamic tradition shared with the West. Like all similar tales, it made use of rhetorical tropes and was determined by principles of exclusion. The pre-Islamic history of Persian, at the expense of its Islamic history, thus shaped out as the period’s idealized other: a glorified and seductive heterotopia in a virtual past that stood in opposition to a fragmented present. And the perpetuation of its mythologized ‘truth’ became an integral part of the era’s collective search for self-identification and identity reconstruction” (45–46). Back to the future 41 15 Cooperson argues that “Shiites had by the tenth century developed a doctrine to the effect that all their imams had been murdered. This doctrine, which was inspired by the fact that the first imam had been assassinated and the third killed in battle, seems to have been used as a way of sorting out who the true imams really were. To make a case for a particular candidate, his partisans found it useful to claim that he had been killed, just as the first and third imams had been. [. . .] In al-Rida’s case, having him die by foul play also helped acquit him of any suspicion that he had willingly accepted the heir apparency” (76). 16 Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, where the cylinder is housed, writes: “When the last Shah of Iran decided to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian monarchy, he asserted that the Cyrus Cylinder was the world’s first charter of human rights, whose birthplace was therefore to be located in Iran – an assertion that must have startled many who had tried to assert their human rights under his regime. The Cylinder became a mantra of his newly constructed national identity.”

Works cited Afkhami, Gholam Reza. The Life and Times of the Shah. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Balibar, Étienne. Politics and the Other Scene . London: Verso, 2002. Browne, Edward Granville. A Literary History of Persia . Vol. 1. 1902. Bethesda, Md.: Iranbooks, 1997. Clot, André. Harun al-Rashid and the World of the Thousand and One Nights . London: Saqi, 2005. Cooperson, Michael. Al-Ma ‘ mun . Oxford: Oneworld, 2005. Freud, Sigmund. Dictionary of Psychoanalysis . New York: Praeger, 1950. Gnoli, Gherardo. The Idea of Iran: An Essay on Its Origins . Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1989. Grigor, Talinn. “Recultivating ‘Good Taste’: The Early Pahlavi Modernists and Their Soci- ety for National Heritage.” Iranian Studies 37.1 (2004): 17–45. Green, André. Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects . Trans. Andrew Waller. London: Free Association, 2000. Gürsan-Salzmann, Ayşe. Exploring Iran: The Photography of Erich Schmidt, 1930–1940 . Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2007. Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Move- ment in Baghdad and Early ʻAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) . New York: Routledge, 1998. Jenkins, Jennifer. “Excavating Zarathustra: Ernst Herzfeld’s Archaeological History of Iran.” Iranian Studies 45.1 (2012): 1–27. Laplache J. and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis . Trans. Donald Nicholson- Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Smith, 1973. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. MacGregor, Neil. “The Whole World in Our Hands.” The Guardian , 23 July 2004. Web. 25 Dec. 2014. Marashi, Afshin. Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940 . Seattle: University of Washington P, 2008. Meskoob, Shahrokh. Melliyat va zaban . Paris: Khavaran, 1989. ———. Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language. Washington DC: Mage, 1992. Milani, Abbas. The Shah . London: Palgrave, 2011. Milani, Farzaneh. Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers . Syra- cuse, NY: Syracuse U P, 1992. 42 Back to the future Mottahedeh, Roy. The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran . 1985. Oxford: Oneworld, 2007. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity . Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Pezeshkzad, Iraj. Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid . 2nd ed. Tehran: Safi Ali Shah, 1973. ———. My Uncle Napoleon . 1996. Trans. Dick Davis. New York: Modern Library, 2006. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. “Narrative Identity in the Works of Hedayat and His Contem- poraries.” In Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World. Ed. Homa Katouzian. London: Routledge, 2008: 107–123. ———. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography . London: Pal- grave, 2001. Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza. Answer to History . New York: Stein and Day, 1980. Wright, Elizabeth. Ed. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary . Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Yavari, Houra. “The Blind Owl: Present in the Past or the Story of a Dream.” In Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World. Ed. Homa Katouzian. London: Routledge, 2008: 44–58. Zia-Ebrahimi, Reza. “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the ‘Aryan’ Discourse in Iran.” Iranian Studies 44.4 (2011): 445–472. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 2 Shooting the past, staging the revolution

In this chapter I turn to a representation of the Iranian cultural scene around the time of the 1979 revolution in a song called “Q. Q. Bang Bang,” released in the US in 2003 and sung by pre-revolutionary Iran’s most prominent female singer, Googoosh. I am particularly interested in the ways this song reveals an “other scene” of politics, one in which the protest movements that culminated in the 1979 revolution are depicted as a product of a generation of Iranians’ fascination with trying out different ways of being modern and worldly. The song suggests that the process of experimentation and becoming, not the revolution, was the ultimate destination and goal. The playful and the performative possibilities evoked by the song revive discarded, forgotten, or disavowed memories of a dynamic process that attracted so many Iranians to the possibility of remaking themselves and their nation. The cultural memories the song resurrects shape a counter-narrative to both the Ira- nian government’s ideologically constructed history of its own ascent to power and many diaspora Iranians’ disavowal of a past associated with disillusionment and loss. Like all recollections of this painful and, to some, traumatic moment in Iranian cultural history, “Q. Q. Bang Bang” has its own blind spots. But any contested cultural memory will leave traces of what has been forgotten or what is too distressing to remember. My own attempt at approaching this song analytically became an object lesson in the difficulty of tackling such a subject. I found myself entangled in a complex and challenging process that cannot be extracted from my interpretation of “Q. Q. Bang Bang.” In what follows I lay bare that process as a reminder that “our own action remains invisible in the very forms of (tele)visibil-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ity, whereas we urgently require them to assess the conjuncture or ‘take sides’ in conflicts where it is possible neither simply to attribute the labels of justice and injustice, nor to rise ‘above the fray’ in the name of some superior determination of history” (Balibar xii–xiii). By offering the example of my own psychological entanglement in the vexed history of the 1979 revolution, I hope to diminish some of the anxiety Iranians, particularly those living outside Iran, feel about having been on the right side of history. What initially drew me to “Q. Q. Bang Bang” and made me eager to explore the layers of cultural memory revealed and concealed in it did not translate into an easy passage to writing about it. I began working with a sense of excitement, imagining 44 Shooting the past that by analyzing a song that recalled the aura of hope and possibility preceding the 1979 revolution I could offer a rebuttal to the many forms of disavowal of that history I have encountered among my compatriots in Iran, Canada, and southern California. Over the years I have heard individuals described to me as unreliable because of their having played a part, however minor, in the success of the revolution. That the Iranian revolution, like all other revolutions, has led to schisms and distrust is not in and of itself unusual. What is curious is the unforgiving view of those who supported the very idea of a revolution and called for change. In the most vehement denunciations of those who welcomed the revolution, there seems to be an assumption that the supporters of the revolution, particularly those who subsequently became its victims, should have had foreknowledge of its eventual dismal outcome. Against this backdrop it is not surprising that very few individuals own up to having been part of the Iranian opposition movements. The denial of the dynamic and grassroots nature of the protests renounces Iranians’ agency and/or renders them naïve and subject to manipulation. The reticence and cultural amnesia surrounding the way the 1979 revolution came about have fascinated me, and I have been on the lookout for alternative reflections and representations in the popular imagination. When a friend told me about “Q. Q. Bang Bang,” I was keen to find out how a song performed by an idolized singer who stayed in Iran and, like all female singers, was forbidden to sing would memorialize a revolution whose outcome alienated many of its initia- tors and contributors. Having reflected on aspects of the song and the music video, itself emblematic of the formation of a televisual Iranian community in Los Angeles,1 I had imagined an easy return for a more sustained analysis of the song. Instead I found myself psychologically paralyzed and unable to write. After listening to the song many times and repeatedly watching the accompanying music video, I was haunted by the lyrics and would catch myself humming the song when I least wished to remember it. The type of immersion in the past to which the song subjected me was painful despite or perhaps because of the fact that I had not experienced the revolution firsthand. At the time of the revolution I was a university student in Canada and, like many of my compatriots, heard about the events by tuning into shortwave radio programs or watching televised reports. Spatial distance did not make me indifferent to what was shaking the country to its foundations, but I could only be an observer who identified with some of the ideals of the demon-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 strators. It was also from this distance that I experienced the shattering of those ideals. Unlike countless Iranians who suffered the consequences, I had the luxury of remaining out of harm’s way and moving on to a new, albeit alienating, way of relating to our “home.” On the surface, at least, there seemed to be no reason for me to find it difficult to delve into the world represented in “Q. Q. Bang Bang.” My inability to get over my writer’s block seemed to replicate what I had witnessed among many Iranians: an almost inextricable tie between recollections of the revolution and disillusionment which made it impossible for any other emotional response to surface. The widespread reluctance to reexamine the discordant memories in turn had a silencing effect. But, as Luisa Passerini writes, “silence Shooting the past 45 can nourish a story and establish a communication to be patiently saved in periods of darkness, until it is able to come to light in a new and enriched form” (238). The silence I was experiencing was of a secondary order, or what Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer call postmemory, “a secondary, belated memory mediated by stories, images and behaviours [. . .] which never added up to a complete picture or linear tale. Its power derives precisely from the layers – both positive and negative – that have been passed down [. . .] unintegrated, conflicting, fragmented, dispersed” (85). My distance from the revolution seemed to have made me attuned to such layers and fragmentations. They in turn made me resist a totalizing narrative of a revolution doomed from the outset. Perhaps I was stymied in my analysis of “Q. Q. Bang Bang” by my own anxiety about having to face what appeared as a cohesive narrative offered in the unlikely form of a popular song delivered by a voice not immediately associated with pre-revolutionary Iran’s “political” landscape. But Googoosh’s trajectory as a beloved diva before the revolution, her silence during the twenty-one years she lived in Iran after the revolution, and her subsequent joining of the ranks of exile and diaspora Iranians situate her well to sing about a period most Iranians disenchanted with the revolution would rather forget. At the core of what is relegated to oblivion is the excitement and the sense of possibility that swept people from all walks of life into a revolution that began at Tehran University in October 1977 and gathered momentum and popularity until it culminated in February 1979 when an estimated “2 million [who] demonstrate[d] in Tehran alone” (Abrahamian, “Crowd” 14) helped the revolution be realized. I am not suggesting that Iranians have forgotten that a revolution took place but rather that they have forgotten that the revolution was once the aspiration of a large number of Iranians. Given that the “toll taken among those who had participated in the revolution was far greater than among the royalists,” it is not surprising that memories of the revolution are imbued with loss and disappointment (Abrahamian, History 181) and that few individuals are willing to own up to having participated in the demonstrations, to recall the ideals that fueled their desire for change, or to admit to having been part of a collective movement. In fact, there is a wide range of conspiracy theories that suggest that Iranians were pawns in the hands of external powers and were manipulated to believe that the removal of the Shah would inevitably lead to better conditions and rights for Iranians. The specter of a conspiracy hatched by external powers plays well against the memory

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 of the 1953 coup orchestrated and staged by the British and Americans, while at the same time robbing Iranians of agency and/or responsibility in toppling the monarchy. The proclivity toward conspiracy theories and the need for dissociation from the autocratic regime that took over the reins of power have dominated the representation of the 1979 revolution. The popularity of conspiracy theories was driven home for me during a summer outing with some visiting relatives and my closest childhood friend who now lives in Germany. My friend’s migration was necessitated by the revolutionary government’s brutal treatment of the groups that had been its allies during the revolution. My friend’s then fiancé was among the lucky ones who succeeded in escaping 46 Shooting the past Iran before the mass executions of the summer of 1988. She was subsequently reunited with her fiancé in Germany. She would hardly describe herself as a revolutionary, but she recalls vividly the shared sense of empowerment her friends and university classmates felt during the demonstrations preceding the fall of the monarchy. Having had to move away from Iran for her future husband’s safety, she too has tasted the disillusionments of the revolution. But when in the course of a conversation one of my visiting relatives dismissed those who had contributed to the success of the revolution as naïve, my friend remained silent. Another relative interjected and reminded us of the massive sums that were invested in ensuring the fall of the monarchy. The implication was that the demonstrations had been underwritten and supported by outside forces and that the Iranians who aligned themselves with the ideals of a more just and less authoritarian form of government were manipulated into believing that they stood up for a better Iran. Those who had funneled money into Iran to depose the Shah and create an Islamic Republic were the real agents. In other words, Iranians were mere pawns in a power struggle well beyond their understanding. I was not surprised when my friend finally broke her silence and objected to the cynical representation of one of the most remarkable mass mobilizations in modern history. She told us about the sense of solidarity that reigned before Feb- ruary 1979 and gave examples of scenes of courage and self-sacrifice she had witnessed and experienced. The other interlocutors happened not to have lived in Iran at the time and it was their turn to resort to silence. The remainder of the time that the group was together hardly a word was exchanged. The silence that descended on us was indicative of the extent to which many Iranians find it easier to shirk responsibility for the 1979 revolution. Time and again I have seen similar and more heated exchanges between Iranians who refuse to believe that the 1979 revolution was not orchestrated by a superpower with designs on Iran. One particular exchange that took place in Iran made me conscious of how the need to disavow the revolution cuts across generations and is not limited to Ira- nians in diaspora. On this occasion my mother and I had hired a car with a driver to take us from our hometown to a neighboring town to visit relatives. The driver was a young man who had completed a university degree but could not find a job. He told us that his parents had helped him buy the car to make a living. As a visitor from outside Iran is apt to become a subject of interest, he wanted to know where I lived and how I found Iran on this visit. I learned quickly that he was not

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 interested in my views, but rather saw my presence as an opportunity to vent about his generation’s fate. He blamed his parents’ generation for what had happened to Iran. He was particularly incredulous that those who had lived comfortable lives under the Pahlavi monarchy took to the streets and brought about the revolution. My mother, a teacher by vocation and quick to challenge generalizations, intervened to tell him that there had been many like her who had not participated in the demonstrations and were not convinced that any change would be for the better. At this the driver became enraged and shouted that my mother’s statement could not be true. How was it that no one would own up to having supported the revolution? Carried away with his fervor, he accused my mother of lying, “like Shooting the past 47 all the others.” My mother was not keen to let this go, but was persuaded when I squeezed her hand, silently beseeching her to stop. The young man’s rage was so raw and palpable that I worried about ending up in an accident. We rode in silence the rest of the way. This silence, I was to experience later at the very outset of the attempt to write about “Q. Q. Bang Bang,” made it impossible to tell the young man about so many surprising aspects of the revolution. This kind of silence reigning over ordinary exchanges among Iranians forecloses the possibility of remembering the revolution’s relative bloodlessness and its unorchestrated and spontaneous nature:

[. . . M]ost of the crowds, especially in the first half of 1979, were products of ad hoc groups in colleges, high schools, and the bazaars. They were not orchestrated by mysterious central conspirators or by some foreign hand. They relied mostly on informal networks and, where possible, grouped around local mosques. The main impetus came from below, not from above. Well-known clerics such as Taleqani did not play important roles in organiz- ing demonstrations until the final three months. The clergy, especially those round Khomeini, did not establish central bodies such as the Revolutionary Council and the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) until the very last weeks of the upheaval. For much of the crisis, grassroots groups acted autonomously and had contact with prominent figures only through proclamations, cas- settes, and broadcasts – especially the BBC, to whose Persian-service broadcasts many Iranians listened daily. (Abrahamian, “Crowd” 32)

The particulars Abrahamian evokes are part of cultural memories “whose cumu- lative weight” have not been acknowledged because of the conditions and the dynamics of power in Iran and among the diaspora (Hodgkin and Radstone 5). Within Iran and in the public sphere there are official versions of the history of the revolution. Naturally the Islamic Republic narrates that history from the perspective of the forces that prevailed, leaving out the sacrifices of a wide array of oppositional forces, religious and secular, that came together to oppose the monarchy and enabled its downfall. The revolutionary government’s own brutal handling of dissent is also conveniently left out of the Islamic Republic’s account of the revolution and its aftermath. As Shahla Talebi, a political activist who was

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 imprisoned both before and after the revolution, writes in her memoir, those who seized power had a clear understanding of their precarious hold on the revolution: “Because the new regime came to power by way of a revolutionary movement, as in most such states, new arrests began immediately after the victory of the 1979 revolution. Aside from the selective execution of the Shah’s officials that took place only days after the revolution, from 1981 until 1988, massive arrests and summary executions became familiar features of the new regime” (24). Talebi’s imprisonment coincided with the massacre of political prisoners in 1988: “About five thousand prisoners were executed in the course of two months, and a majority of these prisoners had already been sentenced to jail time or were about to 48 Shooting the past be released” (Talebi 25). The force with which peaceful demonstrations protesting the results of the 2009 Iranian presidential elections were suppressed demonstrates that the Islamic Republic continues to adhere to the same strategy of eradicating all forms of challenge and scripting and disseminating its own geneal- ogy of power. Outside Iran and away from the dictates of the Islamic Republic, there are multiple and contested memories of the 1979 revolution. Diaspora Iranians are far from a monolithic entity and reflect the full diversity of ethnicities, religions, and personal experiences of Iranians living outside Iran. Even in the largest diaspora community in southern California, differences of class and religious and political beliefs result in a plurality of memories and personal histories of the upheavals that culminated in exile. Some of these personal accounts, of which Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is the most renowned, have exposed the fissures in the Islamic Republic’s official history of the revolution. There are other accounts, such as Houshang Asadi’s Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (2010) and Shahla Talebi’s Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran (2011), that delve deeper into the shattering experience of having been part of the struggle for change only to be betrayed by the forces that appeared to have shared the same desire for liberation from political repression. The return of the former revolutionaries in the guise of torturers is part of the traumatic memories that are difficult to face. As Asadi reveals, seeing the image of his former torturer brings back the need to “confront [his] torturer and the living nightmare that was his legacy to [him]” (viii). But engaging with the horror of the past also brings back a hatred albeit understandable that, once revisited, is difficult to keep exclusively focused and projected on the torturer:

I wanted to lay bare the life of a person under torture, and to describe the effect of that torture on the mind and the body of a human being. In the process I had to overcome my inner turmoil and remove every trace of hatred, line by line. I did my best to view the scene impartially and to be true to myself, as there is nothing more frightening to me than a victim of torture becoming a torturer himself. In the end, I began to see something of myself in my torturer, and found myself recognizing him as a human being too, as another person born in the same autocratic culture. And finally I gathered up

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 my letters in this book, which I hope will eventually reach Brother Hamid’s hands, sooner or later. Perhaps he will recognize himself in these pages. (ix)

What Asadi achieves is understandably not common among victims of torture. Struggling to accept his torturer, and countless others like him, not as an aberra- tion but rather as a part of the nation, culture, and history to which he also belongs obviates the need to disavow his sense of affiliation with his compatriots. Similarly Talebi recognizes the necessity of releasing herself from the grip of the past: “I am writing to refuse being caught in the past, in an imposed image of the future, or Shooting the past 49 even in this writing” (214). Talebi and Asadi agonize over their pasts and through their writing come to terms with the fears, horrors, and disappointments of them. Countless others who lived through varying degrees of anguish and suffering are confronted with the highly contested terrain of cultural memories overlain with vocal, overdetermined interpretations of how a seemingly prosperous and modern nation ended up with a revolution in retrospect few would claim. The song “Q. Q. Bang Bang” intervenes in that terrain by drawing on other discarded and unassimilable memories. Far from resolving the tensions between, on the one hand, the revolution as a carefully wrought ploy to control Iran and, on the other hand, an organic expression of the people’s will to embrace their religion, the song recalls cultural memories that show other scenes in which the change that was desired and imagined was of a more playful and performative nature. The title of the song is an imitation of the sound of gunfire – the kind produced in children’s games. While there is a suggestion of violence, it is subordinated to the idea of simulation. The narrative of the song could be described as a coming- of-age story: it begins with an idyllic childhood, winds its way through a charmed youth to a strife-ridden adulthood that culminates in exile. The story is organized around the theme of playing, as in childhood games and imaginary battles or trying out different roles. The emphasis on the performative is even more pronounced in the video, which maps the song’s coming-of-age story onto Googoosh’s life. The ways in which similarities are wrested out of Googoosh’s life history and a certain mix of Iranian cultural memories of the 1960s and 1970s suggests the centrality of performance in the construction of modern Iranian identity. In “Q. Q. Bang Bang” the performative becomes indistinguishable from what Googoosh the singer performs as representative of the culture of the era. But in the seemingly simple move from Googoosh’s experiences to that of an entire generation, there emerges a perspective on the revolution as an unanticipated turn from carefree stagings of modern and modernized Iranians to a singular, uncompromising, and enforced embodiment of the Iranian. We can see the appeal of adducing Googoosh’s life, the life of the consummate performer, for this particular depiction of the dramatic changes that swept Iran in the late 1970s. Born in Tehran in 1950 to Azerbaijani immigrant parents, Googoosh was registered under the name of Faegheh Atashin. Houchang Chehabi, citing a Tajik source, writes that Googoosh “was originally the name of a childhood playmate of hers” (162). The Iran Chamber Society website indicates that her parents had

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 chosen the name “Googoosh” for her, but found out that it was a boy’s name and therefore could not be used. What is particularly interesting about the name by which Googoosh was to become known and popular is the name’s Armenian origin and what it suggests about cultural flows from across Iran’s borders and the apparent easy movement between Persian, Azeri, and Armenian. Interestingly the author of the lyrics of “Q. Q. Bang Bang” is a well-known Armenian Iranian woman, Zoya Zakarian, who now lives in Los Angeles. Like other members of pre-revolutionary Iran’s entertainment and popular culture industry, she became persona non grata in the Islamic Republic and moved to Los Angeles. In Zoya Zakarian’s case this vocational marginalization is compounded 50 Shooting the past

Figure 2.1 Googoosh LP album cover

by her being a member of an ethnic and religious minority in Iran. This position of double marginalization, however, is also marked with an element of transnationalism that connects the Armenians of Iran to multiple sites of affiliation. The history of the Armenians of Iran dates back several centuries. The future

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Iranian state that was in the process of becoming and consolidated itself into the Safavid dynasty (1501–1722) set itself up as a Twelver Shi‘ite rival to the neighboring Ottoman empire. The Armenians, caught in the contest for power, became an asset to the Safavids and came to play a significant role in Iran’s ability to position itself as a power broker in the region. The history of the Iranian Armenian community dates back to the seventeenth century when the Safavid monarch, Shah Abbas, forcibly relocated Armenians to the new capital city, Isfahan. The purported reasons for the resettlement of thousands of Armenians were “(1) a protective military measure against the incursions of the Ottoman Empire, and (2) part of the grand plan to modernize the capital city of Isfahan by advancing international trade” (Sanasarian 35). In addition to their contributions to Iran’s Shooting the past 51 standing in trade, the deported Armenians provided superior craftsmanship and knowledge of languages, which proved crucial to Safavid Iran’s ability to make itself over as a serious competitor to its neighbors and the Europeans (Chaqueri 3). While certain privileges were extended to newly settled Armenians, they were not always safeguarded against fanaticism and mistreatment. In fact, their history reveals that notwithstanding their contributions, they remained a minority from the early modern to modern times. Like other minorities in Iran, Armenians were less visibly marginalized during the Pahlavi reign, particularly in the last decades of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule. Zakarian’s displacement from Iran to the US is marked by this earlier history of forced migration. As in Googoosh’s parents’ history of migration from Azerbaijan, the memory of Armenian displacement and relocation forms part of the layers of cultural history that have been displaced by Iran’s most recent self- configuration as a republic, albeit fashioned out of Islamic principles. In parallel with the patterns of migration that have shaped Googoosh’s and Zakarian’s lives, revolutionary Iran’s form of government draws on concepts that have migrated to Iran from outside. Googoosh’s entry into the world of performance dates to her parents’ divorce, which placed her in her father’s custody. His own career in entertainment introduced Googoosh to the stage at a very early age. When she exhibited talent at singing, she became a performer in her own right. By the time she was a teenager she had developed quite a reputation, and it was not long before she became a national idol and a trendsetter: “Her music was more sophisticated and more westernized than anything known in Iranian pop music: melodies were underpinned by har- monic progressions of some complexity, orchestral arrangements were imaginative and colorful, and the blending of Eastern and Western stylistic elements was smooth” (Chehabi 163). Googoosh was able to attain another level of accomplishment: in Chehabi’s words, she “stands out in the history of Iranian pop music for being the first woman to sing and dance on stage and be accepted by polite society” (162). Ironically she was to witness the reversal of this attainment: the subsequent prohibition against women performing in public. A rumor that circulated around the time of the revolution portrayed her as capable of outwitting the revolution through her skills as a performer. The rumor suggested that Googoosh had “promised to sing for Ayatollah Khomeini the song that had become an anthem of the Islamic movement, a song entitled ‘My Dear, Loveable Sir’ ” (Hedges). Believed

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 to have been rebuffed by Khomeini and, like all other female singers, banned from appearing in public, Googoosh found herself “publicly condemned and forced to sign a statement promising that she would never sing again” (Hedges). Reported to be “often depressed and remote,” she adhered to the edicts of the new regime. When after twenty-one years of silence she left Iran and gave her first public performance in Toronto, she was enthusiastically embraced by fans of all ages. As Hamid Naficy suggests, her silence and absence from the public scene contributed to how she was received by audiences in diaspora:

Unlike most top entertainers who had left Iran with the revolution, Goo- goosh had remained in the country under the Islamic Republic for some 52 Shooting the past twenty years without singing in public. This had created a great deal of expectation and mythologized the star. Then, suddenly, she was allowed to leave Iran for a major concert tour in the West. Called an Iranian diva, she performed to packed and tumultuous houses in North America. [. . .] She charmed them with a mixture of old favorites and new songs and became an overnight sensation. Mainstream American newspapers covered her concerts and wrote lengthy pieces about her – something unusual for Iranian pop singers. (“Identity” 256)

The visibility accorded to Googoosh in the American media is also about a fascination with Iran as a former ally turned enemy and Googoosh as a figure from the past who “survived” a form of confinement, reminiscent of Americans’ own experience of captivity in Iran. Since her first concert tour, Googoosh has maintained a high public profile, including taking a stand with those who protested the results of the 2009 presidential elections, giving concerts in the Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish regions, and launching a line of cosmetics bearing her brand name, Googoosh Cosmetics. This rebranding and diversification of her career continues to sustain crucial ties to her career as a singer. To maintain this link, she sings both her old songs and new songs that speak to the Iranians living in exile. “Q. Q. Bang Bang” is part of her new repertoire. It appeared both in audio and video format packaged together as a CD and DVD, accompanied with a postcard adorned with a picture of Googoosh and liner notes. The postcard bears a handwritten note in Persian that reads: “In the hope of singing the song of freedom in Iran together.”2 Dated 22 August 2003 and signed by Googoosh, the message is the last line in a personal and handwritten note addressed “O friend, O traveling companion” included on the first page of the liner notes. This packaging, particularly the inclusion of a handwritten note signed by Googoosh, eases the audience’s identification with the journey detailed in her personal message and positions her as an advocate for political change in Iran:

During the years when my voice was imprisoned, I traveled inward. I had a rendez-vous with death that did not come to pass. For a time I traveled to the drawing of a flower, to the time of confinement in jail, to loneliness, to pain,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 and the nights of war and fear, to the innocent thoughts of the children of war, their resilience, and the scattered buds of their being. And then I traveled to the loneliness of exile, to infinite turmoil, to a city rife with uncertainties, to an impoverishment of songs, to the disposition of banknotes, to daily deceits . . . and now . . . I have reached your loneliness and nights of doubt, to you, to him/her,3 and me. And again I travel to my thoughts – to this lone freedom rider. And still the journey takes me to the sadness of exile, to the pinnacle of song, to the remotest memories of home. I travel to the peak of my voice, and in this journey I anoint you the judge, for you have always been the Shooting the past 53 real arbiter once and for all. . . . In the hope of singing the song of liberation together in Iran. (Googoosh 2)

The allusive language of the note aims for a poetic register in Persian and paints a picture of Googoosh as a reflective and sympathetic observer who has borne witness to and shares her compatriots’ anguish. It is not sufficient for her to be a consummate singer. She must also attest to having been victimized by the revolution. But there is also a reminder that the revolution affected her at the level of her career. The autographed note accompanying the album conflates Googoosh’s loss of voice as a singer with the plight of countless of her compatriots, young and old, who endured imprisonment, isolation, and war. As we will see, the video makes a similar likening of Googoosh’s life and that of a generation that experienced the transition from the 1970s to the revolution and its aftermath. The forms of affiliation and glossing of the personal and the communal set the stage for even stronger identification between the singer and her audience. The intimacy with the audience is also reinforced through the use of the second person singular pronoun, tow , rather than the second-person plural pronoun shoma , which is coded with formality and polite and respectful distance. This elimination of distance between the singer and her audience is complemented by endowing the audience with the unique ability to judge. The object to be judged is left uncertain and could be construed as Googoosh’s life and work. Equally vague is the identity of the ideal or intended recipients of this message, although the opening message suggests that only those who have shared the experiences delineated can occupy this privileged position. Before we have had a chance to play the CD or watch the DVD, we have been co-opted into a sense of camaraderie and nostalgia. The virtual community invoked is created by a double movement: a journey into the past located in Iran and a foray into the present in the US. This double temporality and the movement in-between have some fascinating manifestations. For example, the album cover reveals that the vocal of “Q. Q. Bang Bang” was accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The very packaging of the song as a music video and a performance that does not rely exclusively on the Iranian diaspora community and situates itself in the Los Ange- les world of music and entertainment suggests a sense of arrival and harmonious transplantation absent from the singer’s address to her audience, but as if to con-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 firm the difficulty of the transplantation, a glaring typo appears on the main menu of the music video. There are two items on the menu, both bearing the title of the song in English. Under the second listing we read “With English Subtilte” (sic). This typo reminds us that despite the attempt to package the CD and the DVD of the performances professionally for sale in the mainstream American market, the intended audience is primarily diaspora Iranians. That they are the targeted audience is evident in the absence of English translation of the lyrics presented in the notes. The liner notes, printed in the form of a small booklet, scan from right to left, calibrated to an audience that is used to reading from right to left. The front and the back cover pages are in English, but what appears between them are the 54 Shooting the past lyrics in Persian and still shots of Googoosh from the video with facing images of her at various ages. At the top of each page is a heading, dating the pictures from about the age of seven, to fourteen, to her twenties, and the “following years.” The headings are followed by marks of ellipsis and are set off from the lyrics, but they map the narrative of the song onto Googoosh’s own life. The video rendition also conflates the speaker of the lyrics with Googoosh the singer not only in the superimposi- tion of images of Googoosh mouthing words but also in the still photos of her as a child, teenager, and adult in the era before the revolution. Apart from making Googoosh a prototype of her generation, this choice underscores the lyrics’ emphasis on the concept of play and performance. The invitation to find cor- respondences between the singer’s personal history and the narrative revealed in the lyrics draws on the collective memory of a segment of the Iranian population whose class and socioeconomic standing would enable them to share the experiences reflected in the song. The first image we see in the video rendition is a still black-and-white photograph of Googoosh as a child around the age of seven. This image immediately cuts to sequences of children at play: a young girl holding a doll, young boys riding bicycles, children on playground equipment, riding a scooter, or playing with a sling shot. These images, also filmed in black-and-white, accompany the song’s opening orchestration and are intercepted at the moment the first words are sung with a close-up shot of a hand turning on a reel-to-reel audio player. Followed up with shots of a bicycle being ridden into a tunnel-like passage and of moving trains, the visual cues indicate an entry into another realm. The old clips, photographs of Googoosh, and the dated audio player initiate a sense of nostalgia confirmed by the lyrics transporting us back to a carefree childhood dominated by children’s imaginary games of cowboys and Indians. When I first heard the song, the pull of nostalgia was so strong that the mention of a game of cowboys and Indians did not give me pause. Nor was I initially struck by other seemingly improbable juxtapositions. But beneath the sense of familiarity the song evoked there was much that needed to be made strange. And, not surprisingly, the opening lines of the song themselves carry the potential for defamiliarization. The narration begins by evoking the midday heat of the summer, “salat-e zohr-e mordad.” This opening phrase is rich with Iranian cultural resonances. The word

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 “salat,” Arabic in origin, means prayer. Salat-e zohr literally means noon prayer. Its conjunction with the Persian “mordad,” which designates a month in the Ira- nian solar calendar, is not merely reminiscent of a time of prayer in this context but, as the next few lines of the song’s lyrics, evoke the quiet time of rest after the midday meal. Far from recalling Iran’s Muslim heritage, salat-e zohr-e mordad recalls a time of play for children not able to fall asleep.

Two sleepless children At a rear of a narrow alley With a wooden gun, a slingshot, and pebbles Shooting the past 55 We would go into battle against the enemy C’mon, Q. Q. Bang Bang How many Indians we killed in that dead-end alley! What a simple season it was! Brother, do you recall?4

Not only are noon prayers replaced with children’s play, the game of cowboys and Indians the children are seen playing signals the dominance of Ameri- can popular culture. The lyrics normalize Iranian children playing cowboys and Indians as if they would belong in the repertoire of Iranian children’s games and emphasize the apparent ease with which Iranian children have adopted games they have picked up from American shows seen on Iranian television before the revolution. As Annabelle Sreberny Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi point out, there were a great number of American television programs dubbed into Persian and shown on national television. They address the contradiction between the Pahlavi monarch’s pride in Iranian culture and history and his tacit approval of the importation of American popular culture. They find that from the outset, Iranian television programming relied heavily on foreign imports that consisted of “old films, serials, and musical shows, with Tarzan , Days of Our Lives, and Marcus Welby, M.D. being special audience favorites” (67). The mismatch between the world represented in the American shows and Iranian cultural traditions is present in “Q. Q. Bang Bang” but is glossed over in the invitation to be included in the journey back in time. Set aside are also reminders of class and social standing. While television quickly became popular among Iranians across all social strata, it did not reach all children in pre-revolutionary Iran.5 For the American cultural frames of reference to be ingrained in daily life, there would have had to have been access to televisions, which were far from common possessions among the lower working classes. To these economic indicators would have to be added the disparities due to the degree to which traditional and religious practices prevailed. What Iranians who had embraced the trend to modernization remember from pre-revolutionary Iran is not necessarily the same as the collective memories of those who were suspicious of them and did not want to abandon their cultural practices. This is not to suggest that there prevailed a simple polarity of the modern and the traditional in Iran before the revolution. Some of the memories the song and the video narrative

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 conjure up were not experiences shared across all strata of Iranian society. But there are ample examples of the complexities of pre-revolutionary Iran. A particularly interesting example is the use of the term “brother” in the song’s refrain. In the video, the refrain is accompanied with a short sequence showing a man smoking a cigarette and watching the same children we have seen on a small black-and-white television. His appearance at this particular moment in the narrative implies that he is the “brother” invoked in the song. The video narrative con- cretizes the figure of the brother in the refrain and sets up an association between him and the intended audience and interlocutor. But the term “brother” evokes more than a filial relationship. It resurrects a way in which the Islamic Republic 56 Shooting the past has used the term to signify a brotherhood of like-minded individuals. The practice of referring to strangers as sister or brother was adopted after the revolution and lost its positive connotations when the symbolic brotherhood and sisterhood that had brought together a broad coalition of oppositional movements from left- ists to Islamists and brought down the monarchy in 1979 disintegrated and the newly established revolutionary government distanced itself from some of its erstwhile supporters. But as the song progresses and we witness a history of the revolution that does not accord with that propagated by the Islamic Republic, we might interpret the addressee as the revolutionary brother left out of the victor’s history of the revolution. This return to the past harkens back to a time when there were different ways to bond around the common cause of opposing the Pahlavi monarchy. Thus the song also gestures to the possibility of recuperating a different concept of brotherhood than that deployed in the Islamic Republic’s form of address. The shift in medium from audio to video reenactments of the past suggests a doubling down on memory, or it could suggest that the same invitation to remember the past is conveyed through two different media and, presumably, to different “brothers.” Interestingly the use of a reel-to-reel player and a small black-and- white television situates the addressee, the “brother,” at a temporal distance. The video, unlike the audio version, creates an uncanny distance between the singer and the man watching the screen. He is not merely geographically removed, he also lived before videos and CD players, as if arrested in time. In this sense, the visual narrative sets up an association between the “brother” of the refrain and a “brother” lost to the present. We are onlookers watching a figure from an era that has receded into memory be coaxed into remembering the past. This early part of the video is shot in black-and-white. Even segments that show Googoosh atop a steep cliff overlooking the ocean or walking along a path in a desert and carrying a suitcase are not in color until later in the video narrative. It is not clear what prompts the switch from black-and-white to color. That the scenes on the cliff and in the desert are meant to represent the here-and-now is amply clear in the latter part of the video, but their insertion in black-and-white in the earlier segments remains ambiguous. As we hear Googoosh’s voice singing the opening lyrics, the credits roll over still shots of Googoosh fading in and out of each other and/or clips of her from movies in which she appeared. The invitation to “recall” becomes at once a means

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 of foregrounding Googoosh and inviting the viewer to identify with a particular cultural history. The short clips from the movies in which Googoosh starred place the viewer in a carefree and youthful era that encompassed her career as a prominent singer at the elite and fashionable cabarets of Tehran. Cutting back and forth between images of a young female child and clips and photos of Googoosh in her teenage years, the video narration departs from the more inclusive nonspecificity of the lyrics:

All busy playing All happy and carefree Shooting the past 57 No one alerted us to days of sorrow The air of childhood The spring of kindness Passed and we reached our youth.

The visual narrative’s insistence on making Googoosh the focal point might well have been part of a strategy to make her into the embodiment of the Iranian exiles’ losses, but in this process it loses the possibility of speaking to a broader base – one whose fate had little in common with the experiences of a prominent member of the entertainment industry. And they might not see themselves reflected in the song’s representation of young Iranians as mimics, caught up in a performance of sorts. The song takes up this very idea in the next lines, recalling Friday nights devoted to going out to the movies – a time when “movie stars were our guiding light.” The expression used for movie stars in the original is setareh farangi (foreign stars), which confirms that Western movie stars served as models for young Iranians. The word farangi is a term applied to anyone with European ancestry. In the context of the song, it refers specifically to American and Hollywood stars as evident in the next lines: “Someone would sing like Elvis Presley / Another would act like James Dean for Zahra and Leili.” The English subtitles in the video eliminate the Iranian female names and instead read: “anything to please the girls.” This choice, while understandable in relation to the need for concision in the subtitles, does not communicate the same degree of strangeness implied in the juxtaposition of the American and the Iranian names, but it does underline the playfulness or mimicking of American stars. This sense of play is not radically different from the opening scene of play among children enacting battles between cowboys and Indians. In his memoir Tales of Two Cities, Abbas Milani echoes a similar fascination with cinema during his childhood and the imaginative possibilities it opened up for him and his generation. Writing about his crush on his cousin, he notes: “Much of our time together was spent playing in make-believe movies. We were, I think, the first generation of Iranians whose sense of reality, morality, and aesthetics was at least partially shaped by cinema. I, a film addict, often directed our love-spun movies and managed to work many kissing scenes into the script” (37). The video of “Q. Q. Bang Bang” conveys cinema’s hold on the imagination of young Iranians through continuous use of clips from the time prior to the revolution juxtaposed to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 clips from some Iranian films from the same era. While it is clear that the play-acting carries the same sense of play with which the song opens, here the juxtaposition of two American male names with two Ira- nian women’s names also highlights the seeming incompatibilities of the Iranian cultural canvas at the time. The paradoxes of the age become more heightened in the next segment of the song signaled in the transition:

That clear night passed The night of stars and the moon Our generation arrived at its first moment of reckoning. 58 Shooting the past The transition suggested in these lines is then qualified as “turbulent.” The actors and players now are defined through their negative attributes: “neither a wise schoolmate nor a good traveling companion.” There emerges also a sense of excess, as if the individuals are being swept along: “One person carried by the wind in search of Eastern legacy / Another carried by water to the West of progress.” We enter the domain of polar opposites of East and the West with no hint of the earlier sense of play or the possibility of trying something out. Now there is only the serious contemplation of mamnueh , “banned” material read clandes- tinely in “foul-smelling basements,” and “disputes over the poet Shamlu’s message.”6 The need to listen to an Iranian poet/philosopher figure and to parse his political message is in sharp contrast with the imitation of American movie stars. The banned material as well as the politically engaged poems of the time are indicative of the mood and bring into focus Iranian youth’s attraction to social and political critique. Yet these forms of social activism are also placed in the context of a tumult of choices and contradictory juxtapositions such as: “Someone intoxicated with Engels / Another ecstatic about the Buddha”7 or “In the mosque, a leftist poet / In the café a drunken believer.” These paradoxical combinations, the song implies, were tolerated in the dreamy world of the time. In their complex, contradictory totality they make up the political scene of the time in its apparent open-endedness. The next phrase in the song signals a transitional moment: “Friday nights were still movie nights” but instead of impersonating Elvis Presley or James Dean, there is now a fever-pitch interest in the movie Gavaznha [Deer]. Made in 1975 by Masud Kimiai, the film represents a thief who, running away from the police, turns to a friend to leave his loot with him. When he sees that his friend’s addiction to opium has affected him, he decides to stay and help his friend kick the habit. They prove no match for the police and fail to stand up to the authorities. The subtitles of the music video provide additional commentary in parentheses inserted immediately after the title of the film: “movies with a social cause,” directing the audience unfamiliar with the film and the spirit of the times to the preoccupation with the social and political message of all forms of social expression. The film is also associated with the significant moment in the history of the revolution. In August 1978 while the film was being screened at Cinema Rex in Abadan, a fire broke out. The doors to the theater were locked from the inside, preventing the moviegoers from escaping. In the wake of the devastation, the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 “government blamed the Islamics/Marxists, and the opposition castigated the regime for having committed the atrocity to discredit its opponents. The tragic accident galvanized the revolutionary movement, led to the first massive and peaceful anti-Shah rally in Tehran, and forced the government into a defensive posture” (Mohsen Milani 116). “Q. Q. Bang Bang” does not trace the same history but describes the film’s impact – “the high fever of Gavaznha still enveloped our alleys” – and links the passion it inspired to the inauguration of an era when individuals became “brave” and were eager to “play the leading role in the film ‘The Just and the Vain.’ ” There is an interesting turn from the role-playing of the earlier moments described in the song to a different form of action tinged with Shooting the past 59 the possibility of violence: “Motorcycles, nightly pamphlets, knives / progressive comrade / a half-naked woman / in an Eastern hejab.” These possibilities become real in the next stanza when some are struck by bullets and others carry daggers. The alley that used to be the site of childhood games gives way to a dead-end alley no longer associated with play-acting. And yet the actors who have stepped into main roles live an illusory reality: “Everyone enraptured and ecstatic / completely stuck in their imaginings / What dreams did we not have? / Brother, do you recall?” The collective history the refrain invokes is now one in which individuals who had merely been playing along are caught in events without clear demarca- tions between right and wrong. In contrast to these dreamlike visions in which polar opposites once sat side by side, there is the harsh reality of the sound of real guns being fired:

Now the silence of the tar [musical instrument] And the late night kamancheh [musical instrument] Were real Neither film nor song Real guns Austere brothers Behold the turn of the wheel Once again, Q. Q. Bang Bang We died a hundred times a night In that dead-end alley What a frightful season it was. Brother, do you recall?

The turn of events is sudden and without any indication of causality. The use of the term “brothers” suggests both familiarity and similarity, which captures the rapidity with which the coalition of forces protesting the monarchy splintered and the Islamists turned against their former allies. The explicit reference to musical instruments being silenced and films, particularly Western cinema, being banned mark a definitive closure of the earlier chapters of the narrative of coming-of-age of Iranian youth in the decades before the revolution. The last stage marked in the song is life in exile, burdened with loss, absence, and instability: Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 On the shifting sands of exile We settled with bitterness and heaviness Having cast off religion and the heart In this sickly exile In this dark detour There was no one who knew the way Or capable of leading Lost and cast away In this intoxicated paradise 60 Shooting the past What anguish we experienced. Brother, do you recall?

The ending of the song returns us to the playfulness of the beginning and a scene of children playing together. But this time the playing takes place in the confined space of a “a small, narrow room.” The children sit in front of “a box illuminated with colorful lights,” playing a video game of fighting virtual enemies. The video shows children crowded around a video game, and in the liner notes this last segment of the lyrics bears the heading “And of course our children.” Interestingly the last image in the video is of a video game screen showing the words “Game Over” followed by “Not Yet” and a question mark. Reflecting this same ominous tone, the images that accompany this part of the song are of broken or burnt gui- tars, toys washed up on a shoreline, and long shots of Googoosh and a suitcase on the highest point of a cliff overlooking the ocean or walking with the same suitcase along a desert path. The decision to film Googoosh on a cliff seems to be informed by the lyrics’ representation of exile as at once idyllic and hellish. The openness of the blue sky and the wind sweeping through the singer’s caftan imply freedom, while the sharp drop of the cliff suggests precariousness and isolation. For the virtual companions who have traveled the same path, the community fades away, reenacting an exile from which the song was to have rescued the fellow travelers. The inner exile described in the liner notes thus becomes synonymous with having moved to Los Angeles. The audio version of the song ends on a note of finality, while the video moves beyond the lyrics and gestures toward a future not yet within reach: the new generation of children at the end of the song play within a confined physical space, “a small, narrow room,” their imagination seemingly captured by the virtual reality of video games. But “Q. Q. Bang Bang” works at resurrecting and acknowledging the spontaneity, solidarity, and desire to experiment that undergirded the revolution and have since been disavowed or dismissed as political naïveté – thus, it ends aptly. The pathways this song opens up in the imaginary do not lead to easy reconciliations of the past and the present. A different space of imagination and representation is needed for the difficult encounter of past and the present iterations of Iranian identity.

Notes 1 In The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles , Hamid Naficy situ- Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ates music videos in the early stages of the Los Angeles Iranian community’s cultural production: “Music videos have inscribed more successfully and densely than other forms of television these layers of ambivalence to produce texts that on the surface seem puzzlingly contradictory” (198). 2 All translations from the liner notes are mine. 3 In Persian there are no gender markers. I have inserted both pronouns in English to reflect the absence of gender in the Persian original. 4 Unless otherwise noted, I draw on my own translation of the lyrics. I have used the verb “recall” to mark the English as different from “remember.” The Persian expression used is Khateret hast instead of the more common Yadat hast , which might be translated more literally as “Is it in your memory?” Shooting the past 61 5 The Mohammadis indicate that by 1974 television coverage “had risen to over 15 million, roughly half the total population. [. . .] One indication of the prime importance attached to owning a television was the fact that people in villages without electricity, who had survived with oil lamps and iceboxes, bought generators in order to be able to run a television” (66–67). 6 Ahmad Shamlu was a renowned poet respected for the innovations he wrought in poetry and for his commitment to social and political justice. 7 Interestingly the couplet containing this pairing is not included in the printed lyrics of the album, but it is part of both the CD and the DVD.

Works cited Abrahamian, Arvand. “The Crowd in the Iranian Revolution.” Radical History Review 105 (Fall 2009): 13–38. ———. A History of Modern Iran . Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2008. Asadi, Houshang. Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran . Oxford: Oneworld, 2010. Balibar, Étienne. Politics and the Other Scene . London: Verso, 2002. Chaqueri, Cosroe. Ed. The Armenians of Iran. Center for Middle Eastern Studies Mono- graph Series. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1998. Chehabi, Houchang. “Voices Unveiled: Women Singers in Iran.” In Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie. Eds. Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron. Costa Mesa, Cal.: Mazda, 2000: 151–166. Googoosh. Q. Q. Bang Bang , Taraneh Enterprises, 2003. CD, DVD, Booklet. Hedges, Chris. “Beloved Infidel.” New York Times , 4 July 1993. Web. 14 Dec. 2014. Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. “ ‘We Would Not Have Come without You’: Generations of Nostalgia.” In Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. Eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone. New York: Routledge, 2003: 79–95. Hodgkin, Katharine and Susannah Radstone. Eds. “Introduction: Contested Pasts.” In Con- tested Pasts: The Politics of Memory . New York: Routledge, 2003: 1–21. Iran Chamber Society, n.d. Website. http://www.iranchamber.com/. 14 Dec. 2014. Milani, Abbas . Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir. New York: Kodansha International, 1997. Milani, Mohsen M. The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic . Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1994. Mohammadi, Annabelle Sreberny and Ali Mohammadi. Small Media, Big Revolution: Com- munication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Naficy, Hamid. “Identity Politics and Iranian Music Videos.” In Music, Popular Culture, Identities . Ed. Richard Young. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001: 249–267.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ———. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003. Passerini, Luisa. “Memories between Silence and Oblivion.” In Contested Pasts: The Poli- tics of Memory . Eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone. New York: Routledge, 2003: 238–254. Sanasarian, Eliz. Religious Minorities in Iran . Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2000. Talebi, Shahla. Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran . Stan- ford, Cal.: Stanford U P, 2011. 3 Stage managing the return of the repressed

The trajectory depicted in “Q. Q. Bang Bang,” from the play-acting of the opening verses to the arrival in the ultimate land of make-believe in Los Angeles, might not correspond to the path traveled by the countless Iranians who have settled in the area. Regardless of the different experiences of migration, the gamut of Ira- nian migrants has contributed to the creation of what is presumed to be the largest Iranian diaspora community, initially clustered in West Los Angeles and often referred as “Irangeles” or “Tehrangeles.” In this chapter I return to the very site that instigated my inquiry into the constructions of Iranian culture, the southern Cali- fornia Iranian community, and examine how it is imagined and represented in Iran. I will focus on Maxx , a film made in Iran in 2005 by Saman Moghadam, for its representation of an encounter between Los Angeles and Iran, the misrecognitions it engenders, and the mutual unintelligibility of their differing constructs of culture. Despite its internal diversities and fissures, the diaspora Iranian community of southern California has acquired a reputation for clinging to the pre-revolutionary Iran framed by the Pahlavi monarchy. In his 1993 study of Iranian cultural production in Los Angeles, Hamid Naficy speaks about an “official culture of spectacle” produced under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and intended to “push Iran into the pantheon of industrial superpowers within less than a decade while simultaneously revitalizing a symbolic construction of a glorious monarchy in the past to which he claimed a direct lineage” (22). Naficy goes on to describe the circulation of this culture of spectacle in Los Angeles:

To many Iranians living in Los Angeles who continue to support the monar-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 chy and who themselves might have been involved as participants or spectators, this official culture looms larger and more truly “authentic” from a position in exile. To them it represents a fulfillment of an Iranian national aspiration and utopian imagining. Many of the images circulated by exile television are taken from the films commissioned for [. . .] various instances of the Pahlavi official culture. (Naficy, Making 23)

Over against these images, the newly formed government in Iran worked with equal zeal to construct its own visual repertoire of an “authentic” Iran rooted in Stage managing 63 Shi‘ite Islam: “a top priority of the Iranian revolution was to gain control over the media – television, cinema, radio, newspapers, books, poster art, stamps, sartorial style, etc.” (Fischer and Abedi 347–48). The competition between these icono- graphic essentializations of Iranian identity can be fierce, as I discovered in some of the scenes I witnessed. I recall an incident after the disputed presidential election of June 2009. Dias- pora Iranians, encouraged by the magnitude of the protests against the apparent manipulation of the results in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, organized demonstrations in support of their compatriots. One such gathering took place in front of the Irvine City Hall on 25 June 2009. Shiva Farivar, an Iranian American candidate for the Irvine city council, sent this appeal for a collective display of solidarity: “Tragic events have taken place since then that have consumed my energy and attention, including what has been happening in Iran. In that regard, I wanted to let you know, if you have not heard already, that there will be a vigil taking place tomorrow night (Thursday) at Irvine City Hall, from 6pm to 8pm” (Chmielewski). The announcement carefully places the events in Iran in a context that includes the concerns of the local community and helps to situate the author in the Amer- ican context. Maintaining the inclusiveness and looking for extensive support, Farivar posted the following on the electronic newsletter Liberal OC : “We will have members from different organizations give statements. We are encouraging everyone to attend, so that we can demonstrate that the support for the Iranian people reaches far beyond the Iranian-American community and is widespread.” I attended this rally along with two American colleagues. To show solidarity with what had by then become identified as the Green Movement (the color Mir Hos- sein Mousavi, one of the most popular contenders in the presidential race, had adopted for his campaign), free green flags and bandannas were handed out to the participants. Even before the event got under way, a shouting match could be heard on the fringes of the gathering. What had disrupted the seeming display of unity was the arrival of a small group of supporters of the monarchy holding up a pre-revolutionary Iranian flag. The angry exchange to which our attention was drawn revolved around demands from an Iranian American man I happened to know that the monarchic flag be removed from the vigil. Not a proponent of the Islamic Republic or a devout Muslim, the agitated man protested that displaying the lion and the sun was an intolerable act of opportunism. What was happening in Iran, he shouted, had nothing to do with the monarchy and its possible return. As

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 a way of chasing the monarchists, the protestor began shouting “Allah o Akbar,” “God is Great.” At the most immediate level, this invocation aligned him with the protesters in Iran whose nightly chants from rooftops echoed in Tehran after dark. The scenes being played in Tehran recalled the moment prior to the 1979 revolution when “Allah o Akbar” resonated from the rooftops of Tehran. In the mouth of this particular Iranian American I knew, “God is Great” was a deliberate provocation of the monarchists and an angry reminder to them that what had transpired in Iran had nothing to do with a desire for the reestablishment of the Pahlavi monarchy. What was being protested in Iran was not the Islamic Republic itself but rather the declared election results. 64 Stage managing This particular dispute was settled when the man left the vigil and the supporters of the monarchy were persuaded to retreat farther from the crowd that had gathered. The spatial distance made it possible for a sense of solidarity and community, however fragile, to be established. And yet the memory and awareness of the altercation lingered and, for some of us, overshadowed the vigil. What fascinated and preoccupied me were not only the suddenness and the intensity of the rupture but also the fleeting moment when the people with the old flag and the individual protesting it occupied the same space and had not yet made each other into the intolerable Other. Imagining other potentialities of such a space and moment is precisely what Moghadam’s film Maxx undertakes. Through its comic treatment, this film transports us to an imaginary where the most exaggerated stereotypes and our worst fears of the other Iranian(s) play themselves out. Made and released in Iran, Maxx enjoyed popularity both inside and outside Iran. Its comic approach to the divide between Iran and the Los Angeles Iranian community highlights the ways in which the two communities have drifted apart and yet maintained vexed relations. Capturing the mistrust, misunderstandings, and mistranslations that affect the relations between this sizable diaspora and its home country, Maxx explores how in the wake of the 1979 revolution Iranians, whether at home or in exile, have continued to uphold monolithic and exclusionary models of the “national” self and to disavow what does not conform to the idealized image. Zooming in on the diametrically opposed articulations of Iranianness ( iraniyyat) in Los Angeles and Tehran, Maxx deploys the genre of musical comedy to foreground the performative aspect of modern Iranian identity construction and to reveal the mechanisms by which each attempt at arriving at an “authentic” Iranian identity necessarily rejects diversity and complexity. Ironi- cally the very process of reconfiguring the self leads to repressions that undermine the stability of any given construct of the ideal Iranian. Mirroring this foreclosure of tidy resolutions, the film draws on the classical Hollywood model of musical comedy but stops short of offering a happy ending that would bring together the communities at home and abroad. The film’s release date coincides with a significant turning point in recent Ira- nian history: 2005 was the year that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was first elected president. The year also marked the beginning of a turn away from the attempts at reform by the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, a cleric who served as president between 1997 and 2005. Long before becoming president, Khatami

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 had established a reputation as a “moderate” thinker open to loosening some of the revolutionary austerity that had dominated Iranian life. Khatami’s surprise victory in 1997, attributed to his sizable following among women and young voters, ushered in an era filled with promise and possibility: “Khatami won seventy percent of the vote in an election that captured the national imagination as none had done for years. This victory energized a new generation of young Iranians and gave them hope for the future” (Axworthy 277–78). Part of Khatami’s appeal was “his personal charm” and “mild-mannered, smiling and learned” persona, which contrasted with the dour image of the ruling clerics and suggested the possibility of a makeover of the Islamic Republic. The journalist Kaveh Basmanji captures Stage managing 65 the mood of the time: “As soon as Khatami’s picture appeared on posters and billboards [. . .] there was a remarkable excitement” (223). Khatami the man thus became a public face for a reform movement and a projection of the hopes and desires of those Iranians who were eager for change. Khatami’s campaign emphasized political pluralism and civil society. His adoption of a more open approach to the West and his proposal to engage in a “Dialogue of Civilizations” singled him out as a leader who potentially could also transform Iran’s foreign policy. Although Khatami was not able to fulfill these promises, he fostered policies that attested to his willingness to work for change within the framework of the Islamic Republic. In his essay “Observations on the Information World,” he goes so far as to advocate openness to renewed interpretation of religious doctrines:

Many of our traditions are human constructs that, however great they might have been in their own time, belong to a different historical epoch and place but have nonetheless maintained the veneer of sanctity and infallibility. Today, dogmatic attachment to archaic ideas poses a serious obstacle to our society, preventing it from utilizing the human achievements and thoughts of our era. Let us not forget that not just the natural world, but religion must also be scrutinized by reflection, for our interpretation of religion is constantly being modified as well. (131)

The question that haunts Khatami’s proposition is how to gauge the limits of interpretation of beliefs believed to be divinely ordained. There is also the specter of discord between different interpretations of traditions and enactments of faith. Not surprisingly, Khatami’s ideas had been put to the test even before he assumed the presidency. During his tenure as Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance (1982–1992), Khatami put his own stamp on the production of Iranian culture. Without questioning the fundamental role ascribed to religion in the rearticulation of Iranian culture and national identity, he showed more openness to what could be represented within the parameters of the new Iran. Yet, in 1992 he was “pressured to resign [. . .] by conservatives, partly over two films [. . .], partly because of the degree of press freedom [he] had allowed, as well as his leniency towards the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 use of satellite television, which conservatives referred to as a ‘Western cultural threat’ ” (Zeydabadi-Nejad 44). Even critics who distrusted Khatami’s policies acknowledge his contribution to a climate that fostered artistic and cultural production: “[Khatami’s] strategy was no secret: he wanted to use cinema, sport and other cultural avenues to improve the country’s standing. Filmmaking, nurtured by Khatami when he was Minister for Guidance and Islamic Culture from 1982 to 1992, had won the country acclaim at international film festivals” (Sadr 238). With Khatami’s departure from his position as Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, stricter censorship measures were adopted and government subsidies were cut (Zeydabadi-Nejad 47). The end of Khatami’s presidency in 2005 also 66 Stage managing saw a return to other forms of austerity. In the wake of the June 2009 presidential elections, the Iranian political and cultural scene experienced an escalation in control and repression, but in 2005 it was still possible for a film like Maxx to be produced and released in Iran. It bears witness to the particular moment in recent Iranian cultural history in which there were open debates about how and to what extent the Islamic Republic could reform itself and move toward a model of civil society. In that span of time, it became easier for many diaspora Iranians to return for visits, facilitating encounters between the two seemingly distinct formations of Iranian identity. The complex power and cultural dynamics that forced Khatami out of office and ended an era filled with the promise of openness and reform are tackled by Moghadam in Maxx , making it not only a product of its time but also an intervention in the perennial debates about the threat of Western cultural imperialism in Iran. Within its fictional and comic treatment, the film also alludes to the political rivalries and the tensions surrounding elections in Iran. By drawing on the Los Angeles diaspora community, Maxx allows its Iranian viewers to laugh at carica- tures of both those who left Iran and settled in southern California and those who stayed and became part of the new establishment. The absurd polarities depicted and mocked in the film invite reflection on the impulse to isolate and emulate a monolithic modern Iranian identity that by virtue of its existence refutes any other form of embodiment of Iranianness. Maxx dramatizes the confrontation between two particular instances of Iranian identity and reveals both the desire for and the impossibility of self-recognition in the other. The film narrative focuses on the efforts of a fictional office called the “Brain Recruiting Center,” an allusion to the Khatami era, to attract successful expatriate Iranians back to Iran. The significance of the Center’s work is reflected in its director also serving as the country’s vice president. The scope of the Center’s outreach is defined broadly and encompasses academic, entrepreneurial, and other domains of endeavor. The task of finding suitable candidates for potential repatriation is delegated to different directors who have risen through the ranks of government bureaucracy but do not necessarily have expertise in the area to which they are assigned. Their task is to identify the “brains,” suggesting a disembodiment on many levels. As we shall see, Maxx the returnee reinserts the body and its needs and pleasures into the equation, playing havoc with the Center’s plans. The film opens with a televised report on an Iranian expatriate’s visit to his

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 homeland. In this report Professor Kheyrkhah, the visiting dignitary, registers his satisfaction with his trip and vows to return with his American wife, Jessica, and their two daughters to show them the rich legacy of their father’s country of origin. The camera cuts from this report to a meeting of the Brain Recruiting Center where the director responsible for inviting Professor Kheyrkhah, Mr. Nekunam, receives recognition and applause for his efforts in producing a model expatriate Iranian willing and eager to visit his homeland and to attest to its successful transformation after the revolution. Underlining the Center’s propagandist approach, Mr. Nekunam boasts that he is the author of the speech delivered by Professor Kheyrkhah in front of the camera. The short clip confirms the scripted and stilted Stage managing 67 nature of the visitor’s interview. Professor Kheyrkhah does not merely speak a stilted and formal Persian, he delivers his lines like a bad actor. The emphasis appears to be on delivering the approved script, which consists of his saying in front of cameras that “over the past twenty-five years Iran has changed and pro- gressed a great deal.” The need for an Iranian who has been away for over two decades to attest to improvements in Iran is an acknowledgment on the part of the assembled government officials that testimonials coming from within the nation have little or no purchase but that the disaffected and the exiled Iranian could, if well chosen and coached, play a compensatory and validating role. While the Islamic Republic works hard to contain the influx of influences from the West, especially through the Iranians who have taken up residence in the West, this sequence implies, ironically it also looks to this exiled community of Iranians for self-affirmation. The kind of purification of the nation imagined in the construction of the Republic, the Brain Recruiting Center’s activities suggest, fails to remove the residue of the discarded and disavowed self. Reflecting another layer of the mechanisms of disavowal in the upholding of the Islamic ideals, the entity charged with repatriating exiled Iranians has only one female representative. As will be revealed later, the film further explores the role of this female character and makes it crucial in the development of the plot and a successful reunifica- tion. The woman and the exile represent both the disavowed and the means to reconciliation, who, because of their potential for disruption, must be contained. And already in the first musical interlude, delivered by the directors gathered at the meeting, this need for control and containment is underscored. The musical reporting does not get under way until the committee chair has ascertained that the door to the meeting room is closed. Behind closed doors, it is implied, the officials can sing and move their bodies to the cadences of music. The need for secrecy is a reference to the clerical establishment’s disdain for music:

During the first years of the Revolution, there was pressure from the tradi- tionalist clergy to ban all music. The late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Kho- meini turned it down. In one of his most famous rulings, Ayatollah Khomeini said that if a piece of music were not “intoxicating,” there was nothing wrong with it. But even today the state television refuses to show musical instruments when airing a “legitimate” concert: one can only see the faces of the musicians in close-up.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 (Basmanji 57)

The edicts against music extend to dancing. Dancing, or harakat-e mozun (rhythmic movements), is forbidden in public in Iran. Anthony Shay attributes Khomeini’s ban of all forms of dance to the “accumulated negative historical perceptions of dance and professional dancers.” He goes on to point out: “In the second half of the twentieth century, [professional dancers] performed in western- style nightclubs for the upper classes, the night spots of the working class entertainment district of the Lalezar, the red-light district” (“Dance” 104–105). The prohibitions against dance are also rooted in anxieties about their disruptive 68 Stage managing potential. The potential for the transgressive and the disruptive is weighted more heavily toward women in Shi‘ite law, who are “relegate[d] to the realm of nature” and are perceived to “lack self-control” (Haeri 70). Women’s sexuality is believed to provoke sexual desire in men and cause them to lose control, necessitating the ban on women singing in public.1 Maxx’s conformity to the guidelines on public performances and representations in cinema, evident throughout the film, is reiterated in its final credits presented over a song sung by Maxx. The main characters, with the exception of the two females, are shown one by one singing the refrain of a song. In the case of the women, they are shown with their lips moving while only male voices are heard. And while the male characters move their bodies to the cadences of the song, the female characters only make slight movements of their head and shoul- ders. This acknowledgment outside the frame of the film narrative that music, song, and dance are subject to constraints acts as a final reminder that the efforts to discipline male and female bodies fail to disentangle and dissociate the “brain” from the body. As we see in the early stages of the film narrative, long before Maxx the singer appears on the scene, the very individuals charged with the state’s focus on recruiting “brains” are all too eager to musically perform their reports. This gathering of the officials at the Center invokes the shared repertoire of Ira- nian improvisational theatrical traditions that predates the revolution and encompasses religious drama as well as comic theatre. The comic and musical nature of the performance at the Center has some similarities to ruhozi , “or above the pool, so called because, in the past, one of the most typical urban performance venues was a temporary stage created of planks constructed above the pool that is a fixture in most older Iranian homes,” described as a “social theater that satirizes domestic life” (Shay, “6/8 Beat”) William O. Beeman argues that like its counter- part in religious drama, ruhozi carries out

[a] set of important social and emotional functions for persons who patronize it. It presents a whole range of familiar characters, stories, and settings for the audience, but its ostensible purpose is different. It mocks and attacks the whole fabric of social and sexual structures which bind the spectators in their everyday life, and rather than washing the pressure of life away in a sea of tears, it aims to dispel those pressures in gales of laughter – the louder and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 longer the better. (141)

The spontaneous performance the officials deliver in Maxx pokes fun at the Islamic Republic’s rejection of music, dance, and frivolity and projects an image of a system of governance that does not buy into its own edicts against music and dancing and can barely conceal its own desire for the forbidden pleasures. The government represented here is subject to the gaze of an authority beyond its reach. The specter of the ultimate source of authority is set against governing officials who are strangely representative of the nation as a whole. Reflecting Iran’s linguistic and ethnic diversity, many of the directors speak with regional accents Stage managing 69 Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016

Figure 3.1 Poster for Maxx

like Gilaki, Isfahani, and Azeri. Their hailing from different parts of Iran suggests inclusiveness in the governance of the country. With the semblance of the entire country engaged in reversing the brain drain, the assembled directors outline their ambition to attract renowned expatriates ranging from the late Los Angeles fashion designer Bijan to NASA scientists and 70 Stage managing the professional tennis player Andre Agassi. Interestingly when Agassi’s name is brought up, those present mistake the tennis pro for a pre-revolutionary popular singer who used to wave a white handkerchief as he sang and danced. At the mention of Agassi’s name, the officials pull out white handkerchiefs and imi- tate the singer’s signature act. This throwback to the time before the revolution and before the introduction of new codes and modes of conduct foreshadows other encounters with Iran’s pre-revolutionary past. Twenty-five years after the revolution and the consolidation of a regime of controlling and curtailing the memory of the pre-revolutionary era, the immediate recall of Aghassi’s popular and populist singing style shows the cracks in the revolution’s official façade. Rather than associating the name with a tennis pro in the US, the middle-aged government officials recall a prominent native of Iran to whom they looked for the kind of entertainment that has been banned since the revolution. They have trained their bodies to the edicts against dancing and they perform the pious subject proficiently without having forgotten the sensory and corporeal pleasures of a bygone era. The directors’ role in the Brain Recruiting Center is to identify and repatriate Iranians who have made a name outside Iran and to offer them up as role models for young Iranians eager to leave Iran in search of opportunity. The Center’s primary focus is not on Iranians who have settled in other countries, but rather on younger Iranians who need to be dissuaded from seeking a future outside Iran. Carefully crafted messages delivered by rich and famous Iranians abroad are believed to have the desired effect on the Iranian youth. But, as the film reveals, the director charged with finding a model to hold up for the young is so caught up in her own professional problems that she remains blind to her son’s needs. As a woman working in a male-dominated world, Gohari faces challenges of a different order: “when you sit with these gentlemen they all speak of equal rights of men and women and women’s standing, but a female director is like a thorn in their eyes.”2 She cites her having been chosen for the directorship of the center for music as the reason why her colleague, Mr. Nekunam, is jealous of her. Mr. Nekunam confirms this impression later in the narrative when he points to having known Ms. Gohari from the time they both worked at the Water and Sewage Min- istry and to having had reservations about her ability and competence even then. The competitive pressure under which Gohari finds herself contributes to the series of mishaps that result in her office identifying a musician of Iranian descent

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 living in the US for a potential visit. The musician that Gohari’s assistant, Pegah, eventually finds in an Internet search is known for his fusion of traditional Iranian and Western classical music. He has a reputation for being a recluse despite his having conducted symphony orchestras. Coincidentally Gohari herself is taking music lessons from Pegah, who also plays in the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. The lessons will presumably better acquaint Gohari with her responsibilities. That the lessons have not made much difference is evident in Gohari’s confusion when her instructor explains the musical scales or her inability to recognize names of world-renowned musicians. This reflects on her professional trajectory from managing sewage to reversing the brain drain. Stage managing 71 Told through flashbacks, the film’s central story is revealed in segments of interviews that a dour government official conducts to determine how Maxx, a second-rate pop singer from Los Angeles, is mistakenly brought to Iran in the place of a classical musician. The highest level of government, the film suggests, must become involved in order to save face and find an honorable way of ending Maxx’s official visit and sending him back to the US. Through the investigations the government official carries out, we learn that in the process of composing letters of invitation and dispatching them, a mistake was made in the transliteration of the name of the invitee. Instead of spelling Majid Kasraei, someone in Ms. Gohari’s office types Majid Kasraii, causing the invitation to be sent to the wrong person, albeit a musician of sorts. This mistake captures the forms of dislocation and loss that happen when Iranians leave their native home and language. To address the proper musician in the US expatriate community, the envelope carrying the letter of invitation has to be addressed in English, hence the need for the Persian name to be transliterated into the Latin alphabet. As in the approximations of Iranian names when they are transplanted outside Iran, the Iranians who move away from their homeland will need to undergo translations and transformations that might render them unrecognizable or easily misunderstood in their native context. Perils of transnational travel are interestingly emphasized in a short animation interlude that shows an envelope traversing borders, arriving, and being rejected at various destinations until it reaches Maxx, the wrong addressee. The invitation’s arrival in Los Angeles is captured in a sequence in an almost empty café where Maxx and his band perform. The owner of the café threatens to discontinue Maxx’s appearances while a band member, acting on Maxx’s behalf, tries to buy time, promising that the new video the band has produced will capture the attention of all the Los Angeles Iranian television programs. The café setting evokes the ethos of the Los Angeles Iranian popular music scene described by Hamid Naficy in his analysis of the popular media in Irangeles:

Mainstream stars perform in half a dozen nightclubs that cater to Iranians in Southern California. Some are no more than dingy, dimly lit restaurants with sound systems where dinner and alcoholic drinks are served and even children are allowed. The “shows” themselves consist of performances by individual singers, backed up often by the nightclub’s resident band. Both

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 the concerts and the nightclubs are heavily promoted on Iranian TV and radio programs and in the popular press. (Naficy, “Popular” 359)

The scene in which we first encounter Maxx is a reminder that Iranians in Los Angeles have preserved something of the cultural scene they brought along with them from the late seventies/early eighties Iran and that they might not have adapted well to the local cultural milieu. The emptiness of the café and the band’s clinging to a simulacrum of the past rely heavily on the stereotypes of Tehrange- les’ cultural scene and anticipate the film’s deployment of equally clichéd images 72 Stage managing of post-revolution Iran. But they are not invoked as mere repetition and confirmation. They serve a secondary function of offering fissures in the totalizing images that home and diaspora maintain of each other. The disjuncture between Maxx’s failure in Los Angeles and the praise-filled letter of invitation from Iran’s Cultural Center in Washington accompanied with a first-class airline ticket makes Maxx almost faint. Maxx’s disbelief is mixed with linguistic and cultural confusion. Although the letter is written in Persian, Maxx fails to understand the language employed in it. One of the band members, priding himself on not having been as isolated from the changes that have taken place in Iran, acts as the interpreter. He tells the others: “You don’t even know what’s going on around you, let alone Iran. There is a revolution sweeping Iran called reform.” He switches between the English word “reform” and eslahat in Persian, meaning reforms. His seeming command of both Persian and English and the American and Iranian cultural settings is, however, immediately undercut. When Maxx reads aloud from the letter, confessing that he does not understand the meaning of the sentences, his colleague steps in and translates the word ghoghasalar as “guitarist.” It is not surprising that the term ghoghasalar is alien to the Iranian musicians in Los Angeles, since it is rooted in the politics of the time in Iran and attests to the tensions between the forces aligned with reform and their opponents, chomaghdarha, “club-wielders,” i.e., the conservatives interested in preserving the status quo. If the conservatives were labeled for their use of brute force, the reformists were seen as propagandists engaged in rallying mobs in support of their ideals. In the oppositional movements of the time, “ghoghasalar” was hardly a label willingly embraced. Maxx’s translator interprets other sentences he fails to understand as an invitation to Maxx to give a concert in Iran. He tells Maxx that the Iranian government is repatriating all Iranians living abroad. This scene of mistranslation foreshadows linguistic and cultural misunderstandings that ensue when Maxx arrives in Iran. The exchanges between Maxx and the other band members reveal the extent of their isolation from Iran and their lack of interest in the changes that have affected it. This in turn enables them to cling to their concept of home and homeland. The case of mistaken identity allows the band to delve into the fantasy of a glorious homecoming not grounded in reality. Like the other members of the band, Maxx has retained a sense of self that dates from before the revolution. His language,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 appearance, and profession are relics of the time before the revolution. He wears his hair long, adorned with a headband, and uses an informal and colloquial Per- sian peppered with English words. He appears in diametric opposition to the conventions of the Islamic Republic that require all symbols of Western influence be discarded. While women’s dress code was more strictly imposed and observed after the creation of the Islamic Republic, men’s appearance was also regulated. Long hair, ties, and ostentatious jewelry have been frowned upon since the 1979 revolution. But Maxx’s dress code is not as much a deliberate act of opposition to the policies of the Islamic Republic as a throwback to the time before the revolution and the life he led then. As is revealed later in the film, before the revolution Stage managing 73 Maxx was a lackluster university student who sang at weddings. He appears to have continued the same career after his transplantation to Los Angeles, where he has remained more or less unchanged. It could be said that Maxx embodies the kind of exile Hamid Naficy describes in his analysis of Iranian exile television in Los Angeles:

Fetishization and construction of an imaginary nation in exile, like nostalgic longing and its cultural artifacts and processes, entail regressive practices even though they may be motivated by a realistic perception of the decline of the present time, of shock at the future to come, of deterritorialization and displacement, or by crises of identity. These practices are regressive because they seek not so much to preserve the past as to restore it through either fetishization of an idealized construction or by conspiracy theories. (Naficy, Making 174)

The idealization and normalization of a construct of Iranian identity in exile is con- tingent on distance and isolation. In Maxx , this stability is undercut and replaced with movement between two differently essentialized concepts of Iranianness. Maxx’s return to Tehran is predictably emotional. He steps off the plane and first says, “Unbelievable” in English before following it up with “Elahi” in Per- sian, which means “My God.” That on returning to his native Iran his first word should be English rather than Persian is indicative of his profound sense of dislocation. Along with his long hair and clothing, the English is a way of maintaining distance and a reminder that his home is elsewhere. His next utterance in Persian, “Long live liberty,” could also be construed as an expression of defiance aimed at the Islamic Republic. But read against Maxx’s exuberance, it could also be seen as an expression of Maxx’s mistaken assumption that he is finally at home. Little wonder that the Iranian officials greeting him on the tarmac are flummoxed. One person notes that he is different from the picture they had seen of him on the Inter- net. Gohari excuses Maxx’s appearance as an artist, while another suggests that Maxx “looks like anti-revolutionaries.” There is a curious moment of recognition that the person exiting the plane does not fit the part, but it is quickly dismissed as a misrecognition, underlining both the desire to have fulfilled their task and, more importantly, the impossibility of disentangling the different embodiments of the modern Iranian from a self that has already been marked with a penchant

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 for the performative. The scene of arrival being recorded on film calls for a performance of sorts that both the group assembled to greet the dignitary and Maxx know they must stage. Lost in his euphoria, Maxx does not exhibit any concern about the marked difference in appearance between himself and the men and women who greet him and feasts his eyes on the visual reminders of a home he believed lost. On the ride from the airport to the hotel, he recognizes a gas station and remarks with surprise that it is still there. He is overcome with emotion and sobs with joy when he sees the Shahyad monument, renamed after the revolution Liberty Square, but for Maxx the name has remained unchanged. He is filled with delight when he spots a 74 Stage managing 1975 youth model Peykan, a car made in Iran, and mentions that he had a red one and he’d thought he’d never set eyes on one again. It is telling that what he recognizes belongs to the time before the revolution and before his departure. These acts of recognition are also subtle attempts at making the capital city conform to his image of it rather than become overwhelmed by the changes that have swept the city. When his Iranian hosts remark that he is much more Iranian than they had anticipated, he touches his chest and retorts: “Being Iranian is something that is in here, and has nothing to do with being here.” The parallel between the two sites of identification with Iran enables Maxx to reclaim lost territory and to buffer himself against the confrontation with an Iran he has already failed to recognize in the letter of invitation he received in Los Angeles. As Maxx will discover, being Iranian in Iran has undergone a great deal of change. For example, he reaches his hand out to Pegah only to realize that she will not shake his hand, as stipulated by the customs and rules pertaining to interactions between men and women in public. Missing this signal, he still insists on more familiar terms of address and asks that she address him by his first name. Through most of the narrative Maxx continues to misrecognize the social, cultural, and political scene in Tehran, ultimately engendering a political controversy. Like his Iranian hosts at the airport, Maxx adopts a selective approach in his observations. Maxx’s emotional homecoming is rounded out in his hotel room when he is faced with the most elemental reminders of life in Iran. First he is drawn to the view from his hotel window and rushes to inhale the air he “never thought [he] would once again breathe.” Unused to the levels of pollution in Tehran, he is struck by a fit of coughing and returns to the room, as if attesting to an incompatibility between his body and his hometown. But this shock is softened when he visits the restroom and dissolves into tears at the sight of an “Iranian toilet.” In the midst of his sobs, Maxx tells his hosts: “Do you know how many years it has been since I last saw an Iranian toilet? Twenty years, twenty years, but there was none to be found. Come and have a look and see what it looks like.” Maxx’s tears and his need for witnesses are comically emphasized, as if underlining that despite his Westernized appearance and his adoption of a pop culture persona he is deeply attached to traditional aspects of Iranian life. He calls out to his compatriots and invites them to bear witness to the rediscovery of what he has missed most. The Los Angeles Iranian might have missed earlier cues about the realities of the Islamic Republic, but in his adoration of the toilet he finds common ground

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 with his compatriots. As Maxx misreads the scene in Tehran and does not realize that he has been mistaken for someone else, his hosts also fail to register the difference between Maxx and the type of musician they had intended to invite. At the first public gathering where Maxx is received by artists, musicians, and dignitaries, he does not recognize that he is the object of the introduction being given. He hears “Johns Hopkins” and names of other institutions among the credits being attributed to him and believes that the name must refer to another invited guest. He turns to Gohari and asks if “they” are also present. When Gohari probes further, Maxx replies: “John Hopkins and the others.” The need to proceed with the formalities Stage managing 75 does not give Maxx a chance to receive an answer to his query and he forges ahead with his assumption that he has been invited back to Iran to be celebrated for his pop songs, which, although inspired by the American tradition of popular music, are sung in Persian. The American cultural frame of reference is not necessarily foregrounded in Maxx’s consciousness or knowledge. Not only does he not realize that Johns Hopkins is not the name of an individual, he is not interested in parsing what aspects of his music and songs belong to the Iranian and/or Ameri- can traditions. His sense of himself as an Iranian embraces imported elements of American popular culture, while his hosts’ concept of Iranian national identity rests on the rejection of the foreign. The film exploits their radical differences in a comic frame but not without highlighting the potential for conflict. What initiates conflict is Maxx’s attempt to translate himself into what he perceives as the new language of Iran. In his response to the official welcome he has received, Maxx tries to replicate a higher level of rhetoric, but instead he produces ungrammatical and nonsen- sical sentences in Persian before he confesses to not being good at delivering speeches. He proposes to show his gratitude by singing a song. Although he has already made a confession of sorts, “I have dedicated all my life to music, but I discovered only a few days ago that I am an artist,” his performance of a common, popular song whose well-known lyrics consist of rhyming phrases devoid of meaning does not raise any red flags. Maxx begins his performance at a piano, but this piano overture quickly gives way to a more rhythmic segment he delivers by standing up and moving from one person to another, in the manner of a cabaret singer. He ends his performance by sitting on the piano keyboard and producing an off-key flourish, leaving his audience stunned and mystified. After a few seconds of silence, one of the artists stands up and applauds Maxx, incit- ing others to follow in his steps. Maxx and his hosts seem to go out of their way to disavow what does not conform to their expectations of one another. For their part, even after having witnessed Maxx’s performance, the hosts continue with the narrative of Maxx being a world-class musician invited to Tehran to play with the city’s symphony orchestra. A review of Maxx’s first performance in Tehran written by a musician who had been present goes further: “Maestro Majid Kasraii has discovered hidden possibilities in Tehran’s folkloric music. In his brilliant piece ‘Heart’s Flame,’ while maintaining his mastery of Persian music, he arrives at a curious fusion. He deliberately uses common clichés against themselves and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 offers a new aspect of Iranian folklore to his audience.” The rush to attribute appropriateness and complexity to an otherwise artless rendition of a street song suggests both an exoticization and an idealization of life in exile and a facility with makeovers. The individuals closer to and more immediately responsible for inviting the wrong musician are even more invested in deluding themselves about Maxx’s true identity. Maxx’s hosts continue to justify his behavior as unconventional. When he meets with the conductor of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra and is asked to provide the players with his program and notes, Maxx suggests that they just all play together and arrive at something. The conductor interprets this as a sign of 76 Stage managing Maxx’s anarchist tendencies, and one of the orchestra players is overheard saying that Maxx is a true revolutionary. This projected image of the revolutionary is inadvertently confirmed when Maxx is invited to the School of Arts and delivers a controversial speech that ends in a brawl. On this occasion Maxx is introduced to the audience as a well-known figure in world music. Maxx begins his speech in a casual mode: “They ask me to give speeches and I don’t know how to deliver them, especially since the Persian language has changed. But I will learn slowly.” But as his speech proceeds he begins to test his knowledge of the new vocabulary his fellow band member has introduced to him:

I hope the masters of Iranian music will soon return to Iran. But we have good ghoghasalars in Iran. I have been asked to give them lessons and I will do everything I can for the people. But when I stand in front of these ghoghasalars , I am in awe. If I knew that you liked me so much I would not have ever left. For a lifetime I have been singing in exile for strangers, but my heart was here in Iran.

Building on his mistaken translation of guitarist as ghoghasalar , Maxx offends the audience. Emboldened by Maxx’s support for their cause, the supporters of reformists and their opponents face off in a fistfight. Maxx’s mistranslations are picked up by the press and retranslated into a political challenge. One of the newspapers attributes these words to him: “We must stand up to the ghoghasalars .” Gohari rightly notes that he did not utter such statements, but she would be hard pressed to provide a coherent and meaningful version of Maxx’s speech. While Maxx’s self-translation leads to mayhem, he remains oblivious to his role in the political skirmish he instigates. On his return to the hotel, he is met by an angry group of protesters he mistakes for fans and waves to them. Only when he is struck by a stone does he register the intent of the protesters. The film ties Maxx’s inability to understand how he has come to occupy the position of a sympathizer of the reform movement to his unfamiliarity with the political language of the time, positioning him as a visitor in a country whose language he does not speak. To his ears, Persian, his mother tongue, has been transformed beyond his recognition. Indeed, what he discovers on his return to Iran is that to support a new political and national formation, like the names of streets

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 and monuments, the national language has changed radically. Making language one of the sites of misrecognition offers an oblique critique of essentializations of Persian as the stable force of unification across centuries of Iranian history. If it is possible for an Iranian to be linguistically and culturally alienated in his own homeland, the myth of its constancy across time and place might also come under question. And yet the film narrative makes gestures toward the possibility of comprehension and even unification between home and exile. One such moment concerns a meeting between Maxx and Qader, the leader of the demonstrators gathered in front of the hotel. Qader has already been depicted as an arch supporter of the revolution who in his primary role as the coach of a Stage managing 77 soccer team has “Death to America” imprinted on the team jersey. He is quick to respond to the suggestion that Maxx is an anti-revolutionary agent determined to import Western music into Iran to corrupt the youth of the nation. If Maxx is the embodiment of the exilic Iranian identity forged in Los Angeles, Qader is the perfect revolutionary subject who upholds the fetishized image of the US as the “Great Satan.” Qader and Maxx have an encounter in the hotel lobby after Maxx has been injured. The meeting gets off to a bad start when Qader is served a cappuccino instead of tea, offending his sense of cultural authenticity. Maxx switches the cappuccino with his own tea, attempting to appease Qader. The conversation resumed, Qader launches into his claim that he knows who has sent Maxx to infil- trate Iranian culture. In his heated speech he cites the method of pressure from below and above which Maxx takes as rude suggestions that can be overheard by the women sitting nearby. Once again Maxx does not grasp the political overtones of expressions and endows them with sexual connotations he deems inappropriate for mixed company, suggesting that despite his Westernized appearance, Maxx also adheres to a sense of public modesty whose observance the Islamic Republic has inscribed into law. The other common ground Maxx and Qader find concerns loss of hair. Maxx notices and removes a strand of hair from Qader’s tea, asking him if he is losing his hair. Qader’s macho performance comes to a halt as he tells Maxx how depressed he is that every morning he finds his pillow covered with his hair. While talking about his hair loss, Qader too loses his hold on his native tongue and uses the English word “depress.” Maxx endears himself to Qader when he offers to tell him about a remedy but begins by telling Qader that he must first shave off his beard, a suggestion that Qader takes as an insult. The beard is a sign of his religiosity and his masculinity. In modern Iranian culture, as Afsaneh Najmabadi points out, beardlessness is read alongside heteronormative Western standards as “effeminate,” but in the premodern era it had a different connotation: “The growth of a full beard marked adult manhood, the adolescent male’s transition from an object of desire to a desiring subject [. . .] for a male adolescent, to be an object of desire of adult men was considered unavoidable, if not acceptable or cherished by all. For an adult man that would constitute unmanliness” (Najmabadi 15–16). Against this aspect of cultural history, forgotten in the nation’s modern makeover, the encounter between Maxx and Qader acquires more layers of meaning. Maxx’s long hair, sometimes tied in the back but most frequently draped over his shoul-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ders, is a gesture to the counterculture of Western music and is read by Qader as a sign of “decadence.” Qader’s beard is a sign of his resistance to those very norms that made their way into the Iranian cultural scene in the last decades before the revolution. When Maxx suggests that Qader shave off his beard to save his hair, Qader interprets the suggestion as an insult. He would not want his beardlessness to be conflated with his tolerance for Western modes of appearance, itself inextricably linked to the history of the 1979 revolution:

[. . . F]rom the initial months of the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, a great deal of popular energy was directed against what 78 Stage managing was perceived as cultural markers of the old regime. As part of this “cultural purification,” as it was called, women’s veils and men’s beards became the recommended (for the beard) and compulsory (for the veil) visible markers of state-sponsored masculinity and femininity. (Najmabadi 242)

Maxx and Qader are symbols of the polarities that separate Iran from its diaspora in Los Angeles. On the surface, these polar opposites of the embodiment of the Iranian find nothing in common. We do not learn the outcome of the exchange about hair loss until the very end of the film when Qader is shown beardless at the concert Maxx gives in Tehran and giving in to his impulse to dance as the credits roll by. This final transformation seems rather radical, but even in the earlier meeting between Qader and Maxx there were hints of changes to come. As the substance of their exchange shifts from fending off Western imperialism to fighting hair loss, they lose their power over each other and their differing obsessions provide the means to laughter and levity. Granted that the laughter is experienced by the viewer and is at their expense, yet there is a serious undertone in this fictional encounter. If the most exaggerated examples of diaspora Iranians have been the object of ridicule by Iranians who do not identify with them and disavow them as manifestations of Iranianness, the zealous revolutionary type chanting “Death to Amer- ica” is also offered up as a comic foil. Bringing the two polarities together, the film asks us to also consider why Maxx’s version of musical fusion is less worthy than the intended invitee celebrated for his fusion of Western classical and traditional Persian music. The attributes of the genuine Kasraei the Center had wished to invite, although more widely recognized, nevertheless highlight his interest in working across different musical traditions. The website from which Gohari’s consultant culls information about the potential invitee announces: “Unique and renowned composer of fusion music, guest conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra, professor of international folklore. [. . .] He plays forty types of instruments, from Iranian ones to Scottish bagpipes and gypsy flute. [. . .] Pavarotti invited him to collaborate with him on his last album, but the Maestro turned him down.” In the classification of music, Iranian or Western, Gohari and her assis- tants rely on the norms established by institutions outside the boundaries of Iran. Interestingly Gohari herself is a novice in matters pertaining to any form of music,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 as she admits to Pegah and reveals again in the question she asks Pegah: “What kind of instrument is this Pavarotti?” Gohari’s ignorance is matched by Maxx’s own lack of formal education in music. When he meets members of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, he doesn’t understand the terms they use, and the only contribution he makes to their rehearsal of his “Heart’s Flame” is to move about the stage to ballet-like movements. Both Maxx and Gohari go along with the pretense of appreciating the concepts upheld for them by others. The film’s portrayal of the officials of the Iranian government also takes aim at the images projected of the Islamic Republic. A candidate for the country’s presidency, Dr. Poornaqshband is willing to compromise his “values” to be seen in Stage managing 79 public with Maxx in preparation for imminent elections. In the clip of his meeting with Maxx, for instance, Dr. Poornaqshband is heard saying: “Our people don’t need bread. They need joy. They need life.” The need for a politician to adapt his message to appeal to voters underscores that the initial revolutionary discourse that mobilized the country against the monarchy is equally subject to revision. Conflat- ing national identity with rigid and static constructs is no less risky today than it was in the late 1970s. Juxtaposing personifications of the pre-revolution and revolutionary ideals, in fact, calls into question both claims to “authenticity.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the bond that develops between Maxx and Gohari. Responsible for inviting Maxx to Iran, Gohari panics when she discovers her mistake by watching the DVD of his most recent song that Maxx has made a gift of to her. To buy time, she sends Maxx to northern Iran in the company of Pegah and her nephew and assistant. To ensure Maxx’s safety and anonymity, they dress him up as a woman. For this disguise, Maxx shaves off his beard and mustache. Dressed as a woman and stripped of signs of masculinity, Maxx does not merely cross-dress, he becomes an embodiment of the contingency of all identity. He can be mistaken for a classical musician, a woman, and a desirable subject of a nation determined to rid itself of the “foreign” because it already has a heightened awareness that it is staging an identity as plausible as any performed by Maxx. What brings Maxx and Gohari closer together is their acceptance of each other and an embracing of the stranger they mistook for the self. Although the initial revelation of Maxx’s identity had made Gohari very cross with him, their farewell before Maxx’s departure from the capital reveals their mutual fondness for each other. She compliments Maxx on his appearance without facial hair. In fact she tells him: “You look a lot more masculine.” As if actualizing a change in vision, Maxx asks her to remove her glasses and presents her with a new pair of glasses he had intended to give her before leaving Iran. By the end of the film, both Maxx and Gohari have been transformed and now see each other differently. Even this changed perspective is bounded by formal require- ments of public displays between men and women. She and Maxx cannot be seen gazing directly into each other’s eyes nor can they touch. In the final farewell scene at the airport, Maxx insists on not leaving before saying a “proper” good- bye. He embraces the men kissing them on the cheek, but he is forced to express his feeling for her through a proxy, the burly and humorless government official who conducts the investigation into the circumstances of Maxx’s trip to Iran and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 accompanies Maxx from the concert hall to the airport to ensure that he leaves Iran. Desperate to embrace Gohari, Maxx instead hugs the official and gives free rein to his emotions: “I could have never imagined that I would like someone with your appearance. I will miss you. I have somehow gotten used to you. Actu- ally in a bad way.” With the official’s back to Gohari, Maxx is able to look past him, face her, and speak freely, bewildering the official. This final embrace does not lead to a happy ending that unites Maxx and his host, a possibility suggested by her son, Amirali, when Maxx is sent out of Tehran. Amirali’s broad hint that Maxx would make a good father raises the prospect of a marriage and a different kind of ending. But Maxx’s departure for the US forecloses the possibility of a 80 Stage managing romantic union. Tehran and Tehrangeles, this ending suggests, cannot be united. Yet this musical comedy stages a fantasy that is stripped of some of the harshest projections and stereotypes the two communities have maintained of one another. According to a plan devised by the government eager to avoid further embarrassment by Maxx’s appearance with the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, he will be whisked away to the airport immediately after his performance. The strict condition he has been given is to avoid making rhythmic movements, and his repertoire is presented as steeped in Iranian folklore. Maxx surprises his handlers by delivering a song that addresses the very question of brain drain. Circumventing the carefully orchestrated program, Maxx inserts a rhythmic song entitled “Brain Drain” and while breaking down his audience’s resistance to dancing in public he delivers a message that accords with the government’s objective of dissuading disenchanted Iranian youth from leaving Iran in search of a better future. As the lyrics of the song delivered within the mold of a popular sing-along emphasize, Maxx is best positioned to address the illusions of success and comfort outside Iran:

Why should our experts stay abroad until old age? You know when you have brain drain everyone is captive in exile. My brother, my sister, pay close attention. Tell me if I am speaking nonsense. You are a model boy, a young lady You have a bachelor’s degree You who are endowed with elegance You have a husband and three sons You say you don’t have a job, you have hassles [. . .] I know all this I speak your language But if you want to go to Los Angeles Open your eyes, listen to my words Wherever you go, it is the same O firefighter, put this fire out. Stay in Iran, get an education The open university has a branch everywhere. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 The lyrics of Maxx’s song, more than any scripted speech, address the concerns of the Brain Recruiting Center. Offering himself as an example, he highlights the failure of the dream of fleeing Iran for the possibilities offered by Los Angeles. And yet, what he incites in the audience, young and old, causes the deputy minister a great deal of embarrassment. Carried away by the rhythms, the spectators, although seated, cannot contain their desire to dance. Allowed to free their bodies from the strictures of the sanctioned Islamic codes of behavior, the audience might be more amenable to contemplating a future that is not built on the premise of being elsewhere. And yet Maxx himself cannot stay in Iran and is whisked away to Stage managing 81 the airport by the government investigator, underscoring that Maxx’s message and the performance are tolerated only to facilitate his speedy departure and to expel a reminder of the disruptive other within. Although Maxx’s appearance and manner of dress date him and reinvoke a past rejected by the revolution, he finds surprising and smooth entrees into the culture that has been reframed by Iran’s Islamic identity. The diasporic subject sinks into what he (mis)recognizes as an unchanged “home,” while his hosts, representatives of an Islamic Republic grappling with reform, prefer to overlook obvious markers of his mistaken identity. The misunderstandings suggest a desire for setting aside differences between them, but there is too much invested in sustaining the belief in the radical disparity and incompatibility of the different ways of being Iranian for an alternative ending. The film’s depiction of the gulf between Tehrangeles and Tehran plays on the clichés but also opens up a space in which mutual animosities and vilifications can be suspended and/or rendered entertaining. But the traffic between these two sites does not always maintain this kind of levity. One of my own experiences of attempting to bridge the two sides offers a telling example – one that deeply affected me personally and professionally. In 2008 I was invited to a meeting of Iranian, Iranian American, and American scholars in an attempt to create a space for a better working relationship away from the hostile climate dominating the political encounters between Iran and the United States. The meeting was held on neutral territory and was organized by a non-governmental organization with no apparent vested interest. I approached the invitation with a mixture of apprehension and excitement and thought the experience would be beneficial for making it possible for a US academic center to work with colleagues and counterparts in Iran. At the outset I was struck by the sense of cohesion among the attendees from Iran. Apart from their conformity to the dress codes of the Islamic Republic, they had traveled together and had a greater sense of familiarity with one another than those of us who had traveled separately from various institutions in the US. From the beginning of the sessions the distance between the Iranians and Iranian Ameri- cans was palpable and threatened to become insurmountable when the introduc- tions revealed that the Iranian delegates considered a man with close affinity to the power brokers in Iran their leader. Also evident were the close ties between the scholars and the state. Nevertheless I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when they claimed that they did not see themselves as representative of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 the government. Sensing the barely concealed tension in the room, I was keen to avoid succumbing to my own distrust and dislike of the institutionalization of religion in Iran. Profoundly alienated from my country of origin, I knew I could not look upon the bearded men, some dressed in their clerical robes, and the mod- estly dressed women whose hair was covered by scarves, without remembering the injustices perpetrated by the Islamic Republic. I had to admit to myself that my alienation was a product of my having been raised under a different regime bent on transforming Iran into a modern nation. I associated religion with my older paternal aunts who lived with us. They went to the mosque, wore chadors, and said their prayers. They represented all that my generation of Iranians and 82 Stage managing more specifically Iranian women were to avoid. We were expected to pursue an education, shed the traditional chador, and question the religious and traditional beliefs and practices that were singled out for Iran’s failure to measure up to Western nations. My aunts were held up as counter-examples for me and my sister, and their religiosity was assumed to have held them back from becoming educated, modern professionals. It was difficult for me to overcome the prejudices with which I had been raised and to accept and respect a member of the Shi’ite clergy as a university professor. The organizers and the moderators urged all of us to approach the discussions with open minds, and by and large we managed to approach one another with caution and exaggerated politeness. I began to feel more at ease during the meals, when conversation could take a turn toward the inconsequential. The fact that I was the only Iranian woman who was not observing the state-imposed dress codes in Iran did not appear to raise any barriers. As our conversations turned to family histories and regional cuisine, I could almost forget that in Iran we would not have been able to share such con- viviality. I would have had to conform to the country’s dress code for women, and my resentment at being forced to embody a religiosity I did not feel or believe would have prevented me from wanting to converse with Iranians who seemed so much more at ease with identifying with Islam. If the traditional and the religious classes had felt disenfranchised in Iran’s rush to display signs of its modernity, now they returned the favor by enforcing a new set of standards. Little seemed to come out of the extreme polarities that had dominated our lives. I wanted to know if we could carve out a space not overdetermined by these binary patterns. And I imagine that my attempts at dialogue were informed by my interest in non- binary modes of self-identification as an Iranian. Ultimately the experiment could not escape the overdeterminations, to say nothing of the essentialization of the Iranian, either as a spokesperson for the Iranian regime or as a figure of opposition in diaspora. As in the fictional encounters staged in Maxx , we parted politely, returning to the comfort of our differently constructed “home.” In my relief that I was not boarding the same flight as my compatriots who were returning to Iran, I glimpsed the chasm separating us. And yet I have retained a strong sense of the uncanny combination of recognition and disavowal that pervaded the meetings. If this brief meeting, like Maxx’s visit home, was not sustained enough for me to delve into the range of complexities, I have continued to explore the potential in creative reflections on contradictory juxtapositions of contemporary Iran and its

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 diaspora. In one such experimental exploration, I discovered what might emerge at the intersection of seemingly incompatible constructs of Iranian cultural identity. The next chapter turns to Project Misplaced , a graphic artist’s impersonation of his Tehrangeles compatriots that evokes uncanny resemblances to a self initially seen as different from this alien other embodiment of Iranian identity.

Notes 1 “If Shi‘i Muslim men are sexually as helpless as the Shi‘i doctors legally make them to be, then it follows that the power to satisfy them, excluding homosexuality, rests Stage managing 83 with women, who possess the object of male desire. It is because of this inextricable interconnectedness that the Shi‘i ideology imputes a strong sense of power to female sexuality, not as something powerful in and of itself, but powerful in the sense of what it signifies to men and in the reaction it presumably provokes in them. What the nature of female sexuality actually is and how women themselves feel or think about it, or whether female sexuality is active or passive, dormant or dynamic, is legally and ideologically left ambiguous. One can even argue that on the surface the Shi‘i law appears to be negating female sexuality by placing emphasis on reproduction in permanent marriage or financial compensation in temporary marriage. Whether female sexuality is perceived to be passive, active, or ever-responsive to male needs, the underlying Shi‘i assumption is always that it possesses the potential power of provoking men” (Haeri 71–72). 2 All translations from the Persian are my own.

Works cited Axworthy, Michael. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind . New York: Basic Books, 2008. Basmanji, Kaveh. Tehran Blues: Youth Culture in Iran . London: Saqi Books, 2005. Beeman, William O. Iranian Performance Traditions . Costa Mesa, Cal.: Mazda, 2011. Chmielewski, Dan. The Liberal OC , 25 June 2009. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. Fischer, Michael M. J. and Mehdi Abedi. Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Post- modernity and Tradition . Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. Haeri, Shahla. Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University P, 1989. Khatami, Mohammad. “Observations on the Information World.” In Islam, Liberty, and Development . Binghamton, NY: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, 1998. Maxx . Dir. Saman Moghadam. Hedayat Film Productions, 2005. DVD. Naficy, Hamid. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles . Minne- apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. “Popular Culture of Iranian Exiles in Los Angeles.” In Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles. Eds. Ron Kelley, Jonathan Friedlander, and Anita Colby. Berkeley: U of Cali- fornia P, 1993: 325–364. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity . Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Sadr, Hamid Reza. Iranian Cinema: A Political History . London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. Shay, Anthony. “Dance and Jurisprudence in the Islamic Middle East.” In Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy . Eds. Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young. Costa Mesa, Cal.: Mazda, 2005: 85–113. ——— . “The 6/8 Beat Goes On: Persian Popular Music from Bazm-e Qajariyyeh to Bev- erly Hills Garden Parties.” In Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 the Middle East and Beyond . Ed. Walter Armbrust. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Web. 16 Dec. 2014. Zeydabadi-Nejad, Saeed. The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic . London: Routledge, 2009. 4 From the displaced to the misplaced

In a 2012 opinion piece entitled “Community (Re)Defined: Hailing Successes, Recognizing Failures” for the online magazine Tehran Bureau , Ramin Bajoghli, the president of the Board of Advisors of Iranian Alliances Across Borders (IAAB), a nonprofit organization that seeks to strengthen the Iranian diaspora community, questions the sacrosanct myth that Iranian Americans “are the wealthiest, smart- est, most successful diaspora community in the United States.” Bajoghli recognizes the obstacles the community has faced, beginning with the hostage crisis, and lauds their achievements. But he critiques the very model of perfection and accomplishment held up by the community: “As with any community, our socioeconomic conditions are diverse. The real difficulties faced by our community are not a matter of public relations and image; instead the complications emerge from exclusivity. We are marginalizing scores of our own who do not fit the golden image of success.” Bajoghli urges the community to attend to the issues Iranian Americans are reluctant to acknowledge: “mental illness, health and dis- ability issues, domestic violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia are very real and occur daily in our community.” Like other immigrant communities, Iranians transplanted in the US are keen to demonstrate their successful integration into mainstream America and are not alone in their desire to show themselves in the best possible light, to brush aside anything that might interfere with the image they want to project onto the American social and cultural canvas. The preoccupation with one’s image or that of one’s community, as I have demonstrated in the previous chapters, is not unique to diasporic Iranians, as opposed to Iranians at home. The drive to stage an exhibit-worthy identity was integral

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 to the characters of Mashallah and Maxx, or the last Shah for that matter. These particular performances of the self were staged for other Iranians and the Other, imagined variously as Arab, European, or American. The essentialization of performance and its conflation with a homogeneous concept of national character have had a powerful hold on the native Iranian cultural imagination. This was, in fact, the gist of Moghadam’s film, which dealt with incompatible and competing conceptions of the ideal Iranian subject before and after the revolution to reveal the folly of ontologizing Iranianness (iraniyyat ). For a similar critical gaze on the diaspora Iranian American community of Los Angeles I turn to Houman Mor- tazavi’s Project Misplaced: The Rise and Fall of Simon Ordoubadi. From the displaced to the misplaced 85 Published in 2004 as a collection of posters depicting the fictional Simon Ordoubadi advertising a wide range of services to the Iranian American community, Mortazavi’s work holds up a mirror to his fellow displaced compatriots and through his spoofs offers them glimpses of the fissures in the seamless and self-congratulatory narrative of Iranian immigrants’ exemplary self-realization in the US. Drawing on a fictional character, Simon Ordoubadi, who resembles his creator, Project Misplaced implicates Mortazavi, the author, within the cultural and social dynamics of the Los Angeles diaspora community he satirizes. As in the movie Maxx , this project takes us to an imaginary sphere where the mistaken and the misplaced destabilize an identity imagined whole and inviolable. Against a desire to name and to possess a stable and fixed Iranian American identity, in Mortazavi’s project “the very writing of historical transformation becomes uncannily visible” (Bhabha 224). What Project Misplaced exposes in the process is, to borrow from Bhabha, a “migrant culture of the ‘in-between’ ” that “dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability; and in so doing, it moves the question of culture’s appropriation beyond the assimilationist’s dream, or the racist’s nightmare, of the ‘full transmissal of subject-matter’; and towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity that marks the identification with culture’s difference” (Bhabha 224). The “in-between” captured in Mortaza- vi’s ironic representations of the Iranian American in Tehrangeles rubs up against the community’s idealizations of itself and highlights the self-loathing and fear undergirding the camouflaged hybrid. The problems pinpointed by Bajoghli in his Tehran Avenue piece have their roots in the formation of the Iranian community in Los Angeles. An edited volume published in 1993, Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles, had already laid bare the fissures in the façade of a uniformly affluent community. In a chapter entitled “Wealth and Illusion of Wealth in the Los Angeles Iranian Community,” for instance, Ron Kelley uncovers narratives of extreme measures taken by some Iranian Americans to conceal their economic hardships: “Most Iranians, at all costs, maintain a façade of success and happiness. Thus they are extraordinarily secretive, and reluctant to expose personal or familial vulnerabilities for fear that they will be exploited and their status and good reputation subverted. It is a cultural imperative: you must impress others – for the sake of your family’s reputation, your own prosperity, and even your love life” (250). This fear of inadequacy and not measuring up to standards presumed to be collectively endorsed is reminiscent of Mashallah Khan’s anxieties

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 about his class standing, to say nothing of the pains taken by the two Pahlavi monarchs to redress their nation’s presumed inadequacies. The fear of not measuring up to others, be they Iranian or Western others, generates overcompensations such as the creation of a calendar that temporally places Iran well ahead of the rest of the world, or the production of an unparalleled phantasmagoric alter ego. The desire to conform to collectivity might seem at odds with the equally strong urge to be unique. But as Gohar Homayounpour, an analyst who received her training in the US but established her practice in Iran, theorizes, this paradoxical co-presence resonates in “the Iranian collective fantasy [and] is anchored in an anxiety of disobedience that wishes for an absolute obedience” (54). She goes on 86 From the displaced to the misplaced to pinpoint a paradoxical juxtaposition of obedience and rebelliousness in Iranian culture: “We know that laws are developed as a reaction, to solve certain problems in society. Hence within the history of Iran, we can again see the demand for absolute obedience as a reaction formation to the anxiety of the potential rebelliousness of the culture [. . .]. So, ironically, this culture of absolute obedience on the surface is indeed a rebellious one internally” (55). The balancing of these two opposing impulses becomes particularly noteworthy in the Iranian diaspora communities that refer to two complex frames of reference: Iranian and American concepts of obedience, rebellion, personal fulfillment, and community success. But there is also the potential to bring to light the unsettling and the unsettled in two sets of cultural histories. The question of race is particularly complex and unresolved for both nations and turns up bizarre residues among Iranian Americans. Transplanted Iranians who have not let go of the belief that Iranians are racially “Aryan” and are keen to dis- tinguish themselves from Arabs are not self-conscious about proclaiming their supposed Aryan racial origins in the US. Apparently unaware of the troubled history of the term in the West, they draw on what they see as a source of affinity between themselves and Americans. Ron Kelley writes about a particularly vexing instance of Iranian Americans’ mapping of their cultural history onto what they believe to be transferrable to their new home: “When an African-American Muslim sought to marry a young woman in Los Angeles, her family hired a private detective to investigate his background. When the investigation cleared him, his prospective brother- in-law offered him a certified cashier’s check for $50,000 to call off the marriage the day before the wedding was to take place. He declined” (262). This does not mean that all Iranian Americans subscribe to this racialized vision of themselves. A young Iranian American once told me that he was waiting for an occasion to hold up a mirror to the next swarthy Iranian who declared himself Aryan. Sometimes an alternate regime of self-perception emerges for the diasporic subject through the gaze of the other. A notable example is offered in the Iranian American journalist Gelareh Asayesh’s essay, “I Grew up Thinking I Was White.” She describes finding her presumed whiteness at odds with American assumptions of her racial identity. She recalls an encounter from the beginnings of her career as a journalist. Speaking to an African American attorney about a Louis Farrakhan speech she had covered, she related that she was the only “white person there.” to be confronted with: “Well, Gelareh [. . .] I don’t consider you white”

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 (12). This encounter was part of a process of coming to terms with her “own racism, internalized during all those childhood years of identifying with Americans and Europeans while looking down on Arabs and Jews, Pakistanis and Indians, Turks, Kurds, Afghans, and – in the rare instances when I met any – blacks” (13–14) and realizing the gap between her internalized vision of Iranian superiority and the racialization to which she was subjected in the US. The desire to retain her presumed superiority is not unlike the “hallucinatory whitening” Fanon describes in the colonized subject’s dream:

A Negro tells me his dream: “I had been walking for a long time, I was extremely exhausted, I had the impression that something was waiting for From the displaced to the misplaced 87 me, I climbed barricades and walls, I came into an empty hall, and from behind a door I heard noise. I hesitated before I went in, but finally I made up my mind and opened the door. In this second room there were white men, and I found that I too was white.” When I try to understand this dream, to analyze it, knowing that my friend has had problems in his career, I conclude that this dream fulfills an unconscious wish. (99–100)

The dream is saturated with the intensity of the desire to be white and hints of its unattainability: the long walk, the barricades, the waiting behind a closed door, the emptiness of the space before being admitted and ascribed with whiteness. The unconscious wish made manifest by Fanon emanates from a particular site of European colonization and is different from the context of Iran, which was never a protectorate or colony. But, as we have seen, Iran experienced and acquired a sense of its own inadequacies vis-à-vis the West and has long grappled with the internalization of the belief that it lags behind Western nations. The attribution of racial difference and racial inferiority itself has a different trajectory in modern Iran. The desire to be white, to be similar to the Europeans, undergirds the Iranian nationalist embrace of the myth of Iran’s “Aryan” origins. Paradoxically the realization of the Iranian hallucinatory dream of being white is hauntingly marked by fear of not being noticed as white. Mortazavi’s Project Misplaced translates that anxiety onto some of the posters in the collection. They also draw on other anxieties associated with Iran’s encounter with the West. The most readily legible among them is what the Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s famous treatise introduced into modern parlance: gharbzadegi .1 The crisis Al-e Ahmad attributes to the members of the Iranian establishment of his time is a profound alienation from their own culture and society and a burning desire to emulate the West: “The west-stricken man never takes his eyes off the West” (72) and he “can only recognize himself through the writings of western orientalists. He has singlehandedly turned himself into an object to be placed under the microscope of orientalism, and he relies only on what the orientalist sees there, rather than what he really is or feels or sees or experiences himself. This has to be the ugliest symptom of westitis” (73). The desire to catch up with the West, Al-e Ahmad argued, had robbed Iran of an “authentic” sense of self. He drew on affinities between the decoloniza-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 tion movements of the time and sought the means of counteracting the effects of Iran’s political, economic, and cultural dependency on the West. The blind mimicking of the West, Al-e Ahmad maintained, had rendered the nation “An Ass in a Lion’s Skin.”2 The metaphor recalls Mashallah Khan’s last disguise during his journey to the time of the ‘Abbasid. This fateful performance as a dancing lion foretells the end of Mashallah’s time travel and the last of the humiliations he has to endure to survive in his own fantasies. Al-e Ahmad deploys the metaphor as a counterweight to the “authentic” Iranian capable of withstanding the pernicious effects of Westitis. For Al-e Ahmad, the sources of this authenticity are to be found in Islam, which he invokes at the end of his treatise as an abstract ideal. 88 From the displaced to the misplaced Interestingly the opposition between the mimic and the Muslim resonates in a piece the late Iranian novelist Taghi Modarressi wrote in the wake of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Likening Rushdie to his older brother after the Allied invasion of Iran, Modarressi writes:

When the Allies invaded my native Iran in the summer of 1941, I was only 9 years old – still very much a child. But my brother Mamal was 13, which was just the right age to become, as they say in Persia, “Western-struck.” He instantly fell in love with the Hollywood movies, the Americans’ open- collared shirts and short sleeves, and the way the soldiers spoke Persian with an accent. When he prepared his geography lessons, he pronounced the names of American cities with a strange new twist to his lips, as though a cigarette hung from one corner of his mouth. And I remember that once, while my spinster aunt was saying her prayers, Mamal tried to distract her by re-enacting the famous kissing scene from Gone with the Wind. When Mos- lems are praying, they cannot interrupt their prayers for anything worldly. All my poor aunt could do was recite the divine verses more loudly. By the end of the prayer she was shouting, while Mamal enfolded Vivien Leigh in his arms in front of a blazing Atlanta. (Modarressi, “Salman Rushdie” x7)

The competition between an enactment from a Hollywood film and the prayers performed at the top of one’s voice is an apt analogy for the oppositions that have dominated discussions of modern Iranian cultural impasse. This type of binarism appears in the work of another pre-revolutionary intellectual, Ali Shariati, who was more forthcoming about his vision of Islam as the ultimate means of a return to the self: “Islam is what we must return to, not only because it is the religion of our society, the shaper of our history, the spirit of our culture, the powerful conscience and the strong binder of our people, and the foundation of our morality and spirituality, but also because it is the human ‘self’ of our people” (Shariati 53). This need to arrive at an essential and essentialized embodiment of Iranian- ness has been playing out in contemporary Iran, where the new regime, in direct opposition to the Pahlavi monarchy, requires that all Iranians conform to a singular definition of Islam, itself more porous and subject to interpretation than acknowledged.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Neither Shariati nor Al-e Ahmad lived to see the fulfillment of their idealized future, and the intervening decades have brought to the surface the outcome of the mapping of their revolutionary logic onto Iranian political, social, and cultural life. The failures of the revolution, vociferously decried in the Iranian diaspora community of southern California, should but do not evoke the equally totalizing and illusory dreams fostered by the Pahlavi monarchs. Yet the gulf between home and diaspora and Iran’s political exigencies appear to have locked the two communities into staging diametrically opposed versions of the “true” Iranian. To return to Bajoghli’s critique I cited at the beginning of this chapter, Iranian identity and culture have continued to remain issues of public relations, leaving From the displaced to the misplaced 89 the underlying fears and anxieties untreated, resulting not only in the absurdities of contemporary Iran but also in those evident in the diasporic Iranian communities. As the largest and the most notable and notorious among them, Tehrangeles or Irangeles exemplifies how the process of displacement can lead to misplaced ideals. The zone of instability turned into false idols and ideals is the site Mor- tazavi exploits for his parody of the Los Angeles diaspora community of Iranians. Project Misplaced was born out of the years Mortazavi spent in Los Angeles working as a graphic designer in the Iranian community. Initially he had envisioned the project as a series of newspaper advertisements that would run in the Persian- language media in Los Angeles. Mortazavi’s plan was to “create a character based on the visual language and advertising trends of the expatriate community, to promote some generic and useless services, and then to observe and document the reactions” (23). In addition to the newspaper advertisements, Mortazavi created some flyers and stickers posted on “walls, poles, and telephone booths around the Iranian neighborhood of Westwood” (23). From these initial ideas there emerged a book published in 2004, consisting of a series of bilingual Persian and English posters capturing the fictional Simon Ordoubadi (Houman Mortazavi himself) in various photographic poses, advertising services from a blending of spirituality and business, to language lessons, matchmaking, traditional Persian dance lessons, and babysitting, to the art of the Morse code. Standing in for the transplanted Iranians who have settled in Westwood and have transformed West Los Angeles into Tehrangeles, Simon Ordoubadi is the embodiment of the entrepreneurial Ira- nian immigrant seemingly capable of juxtaposing the Iranian and the American cultural spheres and, even more importantly, confidently fusing the two. Yet these portraits do not paint a flattering image of Iranian Americans of southern Califor- nia. Far from the self-representation as the most highly educated and successful professional immigrants, the Iranian community invoked in these posters comes across as a conglomeration of misfits who are doubly misplaced vis-à-vis the lost homeland and their host country. This image of Tehrangeles as both a cultural haven and a site of all manner of excess circulates in Iran as an object of both ridicule and desire. The love-hate relationship Iranians inside and outside the borders of Iran have to this particular community is the foundation for Mortazavi’s visual parody. What is particularly striking in Mortazavi’s work is the uncovering of the very psychic processes that made him at once part of the Tehrangeles community and an outsider to it.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 In his preface to the book, Mortazavi describes the journey that took him from Tehran to Los Angeles. Having won a prestigious fellowship at an art institute in New York, Mortazavi left Tehran for New York in the mid-1990s. His hope was to leave behind graphic design for the realm of the fine arts. At that time, he was not “really conscious of the existence of Iranians in the United States, and [his] theory was: if you want to mingle with Iranians, stay in Iran” (17). When his fellowship ended, he was nowhere near realizing his dream of becoming an artist. Out of money and without any other prospects, he set out for Los Angeles, assuming that once he had made enough money he would retrace his steps to New York. Instead he ended up living and working as a graphic designer in the Los Angeles 90 From the displaced to the misplaced Iranian community. There he found other signs of failure, casting a shadow over his dream of becoming an artist rather than a utilitarian designer:

There aren’t many successful attempts at ingenuity in Tehrangeles. Quantity always trumps quality. You can see huge billboards in Westwood with big bold Farsi 3 typos, just as you can find typos in a fifty-dollar, one-eight-page ad in the back pages of a free local Farsi newspaper. No one really seems to care about grammar, language, spelling, or other details of their advertising campaigns – it’s as if their only goal is to have their own photos printed somewhere to remind themselves and others that they exist. (20)

This seemingly narcissistic impulse is part of a need for self-affirmation through visual means. We encountered a similar impulse in the last Shah’s satisfaction in seeing himself interviewed by the foreign press during the 2,500th anniversary celebrations of the Iranian monarchy. The Shah’s conflation of pag- eantry and rhetoric erased the boundary between projected grandeur and the life of the nation. For many Iranians, who like their monarch were eager to celebrate their exceptionalism, the constructs of the bygone era continue to hold sway.4 The effort to maintain that particular vision of Iran requires the kind of psychic investment that eschews reality in favor of fantasy. A newcomer to Tehrangeles, Mortazavi saw what appeared to escape his displaced compatriots’ field of vision. One of Iran’s best and most renowned graphic artists found a community frozen in time:

Twenty-five years after the revolution, there is a tired, frustrated and indifferent society of Iranians living the harsh realities of an American life and fantasizing about the days when they were kings. For this bunch, interacting with the host society was and is too complicated. Our passports and accents give us away fast, like ex-convicts out on parole. Thank God Americans don’t care about the details as long as they are winning their own battles in their own way. So the Iranians end up flying with the birds of the same feather for a while and get discouraged, vowing never to work in the Iranian community again. Then their money runs out or some other event leads them back to Westwood. And the Kabobis and the bookstores. The circle goes round again.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 And again. (19)

Simon Ordoubadi is a product of this psycho-social circle. He asserts himself by advertising services to his fellow Iranians in Persian, while also nodding in the direction of a non-Iranian audience. But the peculiar and proud blending of Per- sian and English reveals linguistic and cultural disjunctures that call into question the normalized view of Iranians of southern California as successfully adjusted in their host culture. At the same time, they reveal the uncanny proximity between delusional and creative constructions of identity. From the displaced to the misplaced 91

Figure 4.1 Simon Ordoubadi poster (Houman Mortazavi) Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016

In one poster we see Simon Ordoubadi, dressed in a suit and tie, the knot in the tie is crooked, visually marking and foretelling other misalignments. Posing as ostad , which in Persian means both professor and maestro, Simon’s double chin and self-satisfied gaze convey haughtiness and pride. Shot from below, Ordou- badi’s picture dominates the poster and captures him looking down with a self- satisfied smirk. Framing the poster are captions in English and Persian in varying font sizes. Reflecting the self-confidence of the man at the center of the poster are the English words: “I am gooder in defending you right.” The Persian small print 92 From the displaced to the misplaced at the bottom of the poster reads: “Thanks to your moral, financial, and sexual support, Professor Simon Ordoubadi, the inventor of a special blend of mysticism, business, and politics, announces his willingness to accept California’s governorship. Hoping that by voting for me we will be freed from the influence of the two bloodsucking and evil parties who are intent to destroy me and Iran” (54). Perhaps it is more than coincidental that the Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California just before the book appeared. The English translation of the caption, provided on the opposite page of the book, interestingly leaves out the word “sexual” ( jensi in Persian) used in the Persian version. The loss of “sexual’ in the transition from Persian to English is an interesting form of glossing that suggests much closer intimacy with the Persian-speaking audience than the Americans who might come across the poster. Other aspects of the Persian text are lost in Ordoubadi’s translations of himself. The Persian caption shows a linguistic flourish absent from the English version, which does not attempt to provide a word-for-word translation of the Per- sian. A literal translation of the last sentence in Persian would read: “By voting for me you will wash the shameful stain off your face and your robe and dress California’s independence in robes of reality by curbing the influence of these two bloodsucking and evil parties who have girded themselves to destroy me and Iran.” This is an attempt at replicating a register of “official” or “bookish” Persian, contrasted with the spoken and colloquial, that demands attention. By virtue of its assumed mastery of rhetoric, the ornate language elevates the author/ speaker’s status to that of an educated individual. Persian is endowed with a rich tradition of rhetoric in which Iranians become versed through their education and exposure to television and radio. But Simon Ordoubadi’s attempt at replicating this venerable tradition produces a reminder of its untranslatability. Metaphors and syntax that are aesthetically pleasing to Persian speakers defy reproduction in another language and produce absurd results. At the same time in the movement between Persian and English, Ordoubadi’s native Persian misses the mark and becomes a parody of the tradition of high rhetoric. This is best brought out in the clumsy verses penned by professor Ordoubadi. Meant to recall Persian classical poetry, the content of the verses seems to have been constrained by the desperate need for a rhyme: “man az khod chon gozashtam chon gozahshtam , ze khod bikhod shodam dar gol neshastam”—rendered on the opposite page as: “I have gone beyond myself / Landed in flowers, I am in ecstasy.” None of the effort

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 at rhyming of the original comes across in the English rendering. The concept of transcending the material world to attain a higher truth is central to the Persian mystical tradition, but Ordoubadi’s transcendence lands him in a bed of flowers back in the domain of the earthly where erfan , or the knowledge of higher truth, is melded with business and politics. The boldness of vision is part and parcel of the immigrant’s zeal to infuse the markers of economic success with the trap- pings of mysticism and spirituality. This having gone beyond the self is oddly reminiscent of Mashallah Khan’s experiences of being completely absorbed in the narratives he reads about the time of the ‘Abbasid. While Mashallah Khan’s imaginative transformation takes him back to a distant past, Simon Ordoubadi’s From the displaced to the misplaced 93 projects him into a present bearing the imprint of his presumed superior command of Persian, English, and all that is encompassed in their linguistic and cultural spheres. For Ordoubadi, however, there is no distinction between his projections of himself and Others’ (Iranian or American) perception of him. It is the image, literally the photograph, that matters, and all else, including gram- matical and spelling mistakes, is left untouched, reconfirming the supremacy of the visual over the verbal. In this visual cultural sphere where the image reigns supreme and is believed to provide direct access to wealth and power, the displaced Iranian betrays his cluelessness about the “fact that Los Angeles is one of the major hubs of fashion, cinema, and graphic design and other media central to the creation of an international visual language” (Mortazavi 21). This imper- viousness to his immediate surroundings is a type of misrecognition that stems from the immigrant’s need to retain a sense of the familiar and the comfortable while imagining himself conversant with the language and the customs of his adopted home. In the attempt to signal his ability to move across his former and new homes, Ordoubadi transports words and concepts from one into the other. Hence “business” is not translated. Instead it is transliterated in Persian as biznes . The movement from Persian into English is captured in the very bottom of the poster as: “If I am your freind [sic ] then your enemy is mine.” The typo in the word “friend” and the use of “gooder” betray a rudimentary knowledge of English, while the attempt at high rhetoric in Persian reveals a stiltedness that calls into question the speaker’s ease with Persian. Interestingly “governorship” is translated correctly into Persian as ostandari but is reproduced in English misspelled as “president- cey” and glaringly inserted into the Persian caption, as if to highlight the diasporic Iranian’s struggle to acquire agency in the political sphere. The nefarious and mysterious forces that he imagines are out to get him and “Iran” somehow also threaten California and its independence. Politics thus understood is infused with paranoia, whether in Iran or in California, and the only solidarity and community that can be established is through the convergence of “enemies.” This politics of enmity, evident in other posters, is adorned with Ordoubadi’s election slogan: “Today unity, tomorrow revenge” (56) and minces no words about others, particularly rivals in the field of politics. A poster mostly in Persian, for instance, reads: “In the name of God,” the invocation made customary after the formation of the Islamic Republic, producing a mismatch with the political

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 office sought in California. The message continues in the same vein: “Announc- ing our gratitude to you and deep hatred for the competitors and other enemies, please elect Simon Ordoubadi as California governor” (56). Cluttered with traces of an imagined Iran of the past and the present and an imaginary construct of Irangeles symbolic of California, the candidate’s message misses its target: “One Man . . . One Iran.” The caption in Persian placed in the middle of the poster framing an image of Ordoubadi waving reinforces the logic of hatred and enmity present in the earlier message: “Electing others is equal to betraying Iran.” Ordou- badi’s self-accorded visibility appears to entitle him to become the sole representative of Iran: “Reflection of Iranian History in one man: Simon Ordoubadi” (32). 94 From the displaced to the misplaced The posters devoted to Ordoubadi’s incarnations as a candidate for California governor echo an amazing self-confidence in no way diminished by his inability to communicate his ideas in English. In a bilingual campaign poster, Ordoubadi stands and waves his right hand, his gaze on an eagle perched on his left shoulder. The poster is covered with Persian and English in varying fonts. The largest caption in English reads: “I govern you good.” Immediately beneath it we read in Persian: “Everybody knows that California’s governor should be an Iranian” and is followed up in English: “Leave politics to experts. I am your next gover- nor of Sakremento.” Not recognizing or misrecognizing the misspelled city name, the confident candidate takes this occasion to also advertise services he provides: translation, refugee visa application, plumbing, traditional Iranian sports, folkloric dances (including the lambada, Lezgi, Arabic sword dance, and Iranian ballet) (64). The planks of Ordoubadi’s election platform, enumerated on the poster, consist of eleven articles, such as: “Renaming Westwood area to Sattar Khan,”5 “Free security alarms and guards for Iranian neighborhoods,” “Formation of action squads to confront the influential anti-Iranian groups,” and “Erecting a security wall to protect the Iranian neighborhoods.” The idea of barricading Iranian neighborhoods shows up repeatedly. In one poster we see Ordoubadi in an incarnation as an engineer. Engineering, like medicine, has been a sought- after and reputable field of study in modern Iran. A marker of the social capital the designation accrues to those who become engineers is to preface their names with their professional designation. Engineer Ordoubadi is, like Engineer Gohari in Maxx , a respected professional capable of delivering on his promises to his fellow Iranian Americans. In a poster we see him well into the plan to segregate the Iranian neighborhoods with a security wall. The Persian caption reads: “Release yourselves from this filth and insecurity caused by those who are different by segregating your business and residential neighborhoods. Because the past and the future belong to us” (60). Interestingly bracketed off is the present, underscoring the immigrant’s inability to negotiate it. In another poster picking up on the same theme, Engineer Ordoubadi poses against the constructed wall, while the caption points to the progress made on the project: “By the will of your selected gubernatorial candidate, renowned engineer Simon Ordoubadi, the ‘security wall project’ is steaming ahead at full legal speed” (62). The fear and paranoia implied in the desire to separate Iranians from the rest of the society can also turn inward. Adorned with the motto “Today unity,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 tomorrow revenge,” both posters gesture toward the absence of unity and the vexed camaraderie of the Iranian LA community, both within itself and its relation to its multicultural outside. Sensing betrayal, the candidate lashes out in a poster with a picture of Ordou- badi on the phone, dressed more casually in a leather jacket and tie, resting one hand on his heart as a gesture of humility. Most of the print is in English and begins with the largest at the very top of the poster: “I don’t need your vote,” which appears to be in contradiction to the sentences that follow: “They want me not governer it is up to you to defend me and your right. I am only doing this for you. Voting me is good for California.” The insistence on delivering the message in English shows a contradictory posture vis-à-vis his adopted home. His English From the displaced to the misplaced 95 Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016

Figure 4.2 Simon Ordoubadi poster (Houman Mortazavi)

is an approximation of what he has heard in Los Angeles and appears to be tar- geting the non-Iranian audience. Yet his form of address bears traces of his own language and cultural understanding. Relating only to his Iranian compatriots, Ordoubadi feigns interest in the non-Iranian inhabitants of Los Angeles and Cali- fornia, only to return to his familiar patterns and structures. Thus he both seeks 96 From the displaced to the misplaced and rejects other Iranians. He wants to be like them and unique among them, and he wants to preserve what he believes are crucial aspects of Iranian culture, and at the same time he wants to be recognized as an “American” in his new home. The movement between what he believes he is and what he would like to become circles back through a deeply ingrained sense of paranoia that envelops both the Iranian and the American. This kind of paranoia is, I came to find, a crucial aspect of the southern California diasporic community and has frequently caught me off guard. When I first arrived at the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine as its director, I was visited by a number of members of the local Iranian community. The requests for appointments made me feel warmly welcome. But the visits themselves began to have a common thread: warnings for me about specific individuals and groups to approach with caution. At first I was curious about the dynamics of the community and invested a great deal of time in getting to know the community organizations and their representatives. But no amount of research and observation could help me navigate a path through the complicated relationships among them. If I assented to meet with a particular group, I was chastised by another for my naivete and lack of understanding. The most common reproach leveled at me was my lack of political know-how or the skills necessary to avoid politics alto- gether. Mired in intense political maneuvers, almost all individuals who offered to guide me reminded me that no matter what course I chose for the university center it was imperative that I avoid politics. By politics most frequently was meant blundering into anything that represented the Islamic Republic of Iran in a good light. I learned that the IRI stood for more than the Islamic Republic of Iran; the acronym was emblematic of betrayal and loss. By engaging with what evoked that sense of loss, I risked becoming identified as an agent and a representative of the regime in Iran. It took surprisingly little time for me to start dreading any meeting with members of the Iranian community. Far from feeling placed and grounded, I, not unlike Simon Ordoubadi, had become misplaced. This took me back to Mortazavi’s creation, and I returned to an exploration of what this personification of collective fears could reveal. In a mock interview included in Project Misplaced, Ordoubadi divulges the lack of trust and apprehension with which his campaign and his life are imbued.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 When the Iranian American journalist Tara Bahrampour asks him about the politics behind the slogans of unity and revenge, he answers:

“We’re under threat, because we have many enemies” “Because we are weak now, we can’t take revenge,” he explained. What, exactly, does he want to take revenge for, and how does he mean to exact it? Simon is vague on these points. “What” and “How don’t seem as important as “When.” “When we unite, when we are successful, we do whatever we want, like everybody else. And everybody likes to take revenge.” (87) From the displaced to the misplaced 97 As in the posters, the prospect of unity is later shattered when Bahrampour presses Ordoubadi for reasons behind his campaign’s failure. The threat now shifts from non-Iranians to the very compatriots he was trying to protect:

. . . [A]s Simon’s campaign heated up, several other Iranians decided to run for governor themselves. “They didn’t win either,” he quickly notes. “That’s good.” Still, the damage was done. “They ruined my thing. I think they ran to fight me.” Among Iranians, he adds, “It’s always like that. You do something, and then everybody runs to be like you. They didn’t want to be governor. They ran to be like me.” . . . Did anybody actually vote for Simon Ordoubadi for governor? There is a long pause. “My friends,” he says. “Yes,” he continues sadly. “Yes. All my friends said they voted for me. But I don’t know, you can’t check. He stares into the trail of steam curling up from his tea glass, shaking his head at one of the many quirks he has discovered in the American political system. “They don’t let you check.”

Still the enterprising Ordoubadi does not give in to despair. In fact, he holds to higher goals: “Clearly, Simon has not ruled out the possibility of future campaigns. He even speaks of someday assuming a position of influence back home (perhaps, he muses, he could build a wall around Tehran) . . . ‘become leader of Iran, if they want,’ he says. Whether it is something he himself wants is not important – he brushes the question away with a dignified tilt of his chin. ‘I do anything for Iran’ ” (89). The misalignment between the wishes of the self-sacrificing Iranian immigrant and the American social and political system is best brought out in the poster whose caption is entirely in English. Disjointed and often incomprehensible slogans like “We Like Screaming Lions,” “Who Cares, I Cares,” and “We governer ourself” (80) lay bare the state of the diasporic subject who would like to imagine himself as fully transplanted on the new soil. Here we see the unraveling of both Persian and English. No longer anchored in anything but sound bites and catchphrases culled from the Iranian and American contexts, Simon Ordoubadi becomes the hybrid par excellence. He floats over and above the sign systems that produce meaning in Persian and English, in an Iranian and an American setting, and ends up with a hybrid language and image that like the tie whose knot is not perfectly centered, is decentered. The hybrid of sorts does not fit neatly into any set of cultural expecta-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 tions. And yet if there is a new source of creativity and potential in this hybrid being, he himself is incapable of seeing and recognizing it. Like his language, which he mistakes for literate and poetic rather than a way of breaking out of strictures of Persian and English, his self-image is not a deliberate or defiant construction but rather a bad copy. Instead of innovation, as Mortazavi points out, the visual signs of the diasporic community’s success can also act as reminders that one set of icons have been replaced by another without a substantive transformation:

It’s 1997. I’m sitting in the waiting room of an Iranian record label that produces Persian pop. I’m waiting to meet with the owner and art director of the 98 From the displaced to the misplaced company. . . . I scan the room and realize that I’m sitting underneath a huge airbrushed photo of a short fat woman reclining in a belly dance costume, looking back at me with lusty lips and too much makeup. . . . And then I remember sitting in offices in Iran underneath this or that leader’s portrait, thinking to myself that I have to get out of there. So after giving up everything . . . all I have done is to change my seat? God, how I hate these people. (18)

Project Misplaced is more than Mortazavi’s personal exorcism. He asks his Iranian American audience to see the humor in their own strained efforts at navigating a different culture and uses humor as a means of coming to terms with what the three decades of community formation have achieved in Los Angeles. Hamid Naficy had argued that hybridity enabled Los Angeles Iranians to assert themselves and establish a community: “What sustained for a dozen years the Iranians in Los Angeles and even helped them to flourish as a community – without being forced to live in a single physical enclave – was their ability to weave their individual exilic existence into the larger fabric of synchronic collective affiliations created by hybrid cultures and their economy” (193). Mortazavi intervenes in this very economy of hybridity but parodies its self-congratulatory account of the realization of the American dream. The posters on which Ordou- badi appears advertising his varying services are masks donned by the Iranian immigrant to pass as a successful transplant. Instead they reveal the impossible dream of outsmarting everyone and ultimately betray a residue of self-loathing and fear of inadequacy. For the artist behind Project Misplaced there was a similar coming to terms with his own worst fears: becoming like the Los Angeles Iranians he derided. Having to confront them was productive and culminated in the recognition that “there is no ‘them,’ but only ‘us.’ My mixed bag of emotions included shame and embarrassment about my previous very angry self” (22). The angry self gives way to a more reflective self not afraid to see himself as the other:

Soleyman, or Simon, Ordoubadi is the embodiment of my own alter ego going through a torture test. But he is also our collective unconscious let loose in the wilderness. He is us when nobody is watching. He is us without fear of being judged or compared. The roots of his actions are deeply embedded in our

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 culture and society. Hence his various incarnations as all-too-familiar figures in the contemporary capitalist marketplace: inventor, spiritual leader, political aspirant, teacher, and eventually, babysitter. Ordoubadi’s earnestness is unsettling precisely because his efforts seem so misplaced. (23–24)

The making of the project becomes a path to grasping that the Iranians whom Mortazavi saw as others are always already part of him, or, to draw on Julia Kristeva’s conception, “The Other Is My (Own and Proper) Unconscious ” (emphasis in the original 183). As she argues, Freud takes the “psychological From the displaced to the misplaced 99 phenomenon of ‘uncanny strangeness’ ” from its initial scope of analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann to “an investigation into anguish generally speaking and, in a fashion that is even more universal, into the dynamics of the unconscious ” (182).6 This proposition moves the “uncanny strangeness from the outside, where fright had anchored it, to locate it inside, not inside the familiar as one’s own proper, but the familiar potentially tainted with strangeness and referred (beyond its imaginative origin) to an improper past. The other is my (‘own and proper’) unconscious” (183). At first glance modern Iranian cultural history seems to epitomize a movement away from the internalization of the other within. In fact, as we have seen in previous chapters, there has been a strong urge to imagine and to idealize an Iranian identity purified either of Arab/ Islamic or of Western influence. But the space between the different forms of ossification of cultural identity offers possibilities for a movement within that Mortazavi uncovers in the creation of Project Misplaced. One poster appeals to these very fears. The topmost caption in Persian reads: “Do you doubt? Are you an alien? Nobody understands you? Is it dangerous?” (42). In these questions trepidation and anxiety about alienation set the vulnerable self against unspecified dangers. As Mortazavi’s Project Misplaced illustrates, this danger readily maps onto other Iranians who are alternately sought and shunned. In the mock interview with Bahrampour, Simon blames his compatriots for his failure. Jealous of his visibility, he claims, other Iranians also chose to run for office: “ ‘They ruined my thing. I think they ran to fight me.’ Among Iranians he adds, ‘It’s always like that. You do something, and then everybody runs to be like you. They didn’t want to be governor. They ran to be like me’ ” (88). The threat to the immigrant thus comes from within the Iranian community, i.e., that which is most closely identified with the self. Paradoxically this familiar stranger within is also what is most feared and reviled. “I am not like them” is the subheading for a segment of Mortazavi’s introduction. The prominence of the “I” struggling for validation and distinction from the other Iranians is best illustrated in a poster that belongs to Simon’s run for office. It depicts the same smug Simon with an eagle perched on his shoulder, gesturing toward his political ambitions in America. While carrying some of the political slogans used in other posters, it stands out for the imposing caption across the top: “Faghat Man [Only Me].” The size of the font makes for an even more prominent message and by the same token highlights the fragility of the subject at the center of the message and the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 image. The campaign to which this poster speaks is ironically for governing the self at a social and psychic level. The posters externalize the battle within and attempt to project it onto a persona that is at once familiar and strange. In Mortazavi’s case, long before he embarked on his journey to the US, the personification of his feared failure was “a mythical, absent and mysterious uncle [. . .] whose image my mother deployed as a familial bogeyman, an example of what might happen to me if I kept on refusing things that were supposed to be good for me. . . . My uncle became the personification of disconnection, emotional distance, and social irrelevance, and I knew my mother didn’t want to lose a son the way she had lost a brother so many years ago” (16). When he finds his 100 From the displaced to the misplaced uncle in Los Angeles, he discovers the image he had been given of his uncle was far from inaccurate:

He had been traveling in Europe and South and North America on an Iranian passport, living the life of a gypsy, never staying in one country long enough to become an official resident. Since leaving Iran fifty-four years ago, he had done everything from producing and directing material for the German television stations to teaching cinema in a university in Bogota to driving taxi- cabs in Los Angeles. Now entangled in two court cases, he was on a budget of three dollars a day, with a bad knee, a cataract in one eye, and bleeding gums. (26)

This encounter confirms that the uncle is the alter ego he has feared during his stay in Los Angeles, and the recognition sinks in: “This could be Ordoubadi in the future, at age sixty-four. He will have tried to adapt but failed. He has some skills but they are not enough, insufficient or simply not in demand. He has tried his hand at everything but in the end failed in all his attempts” (26). Project Mis- placed is a form of becoming Ordoubadi, the ultimate failed Iranian American and an acknowledgment that he too is part of the Los Angeles Iranian community: “I wish I could redo the whole project with my uncle, rather than me, posing for the photos of Ordoubadi. I wish I could help him out of this spiral dive, but what can I do? My name is down on the same list. I have the Ordoubadi gene in my cells too. He needs a community that can sustain him, not a charity to bail him out at moments of desperation” (26). Acknowledging the misfits and failures among the Iranians who live in Los Angeles and the thin line separating them from the exemplars of the Iranian American community, Mortazavi releases the hold that unitary concepts of the Iranian have had on the diaspora Iranian community. His art project resonates with a question that R. Radhakrishnan poses about Indian identity in his essay “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora”:

Do I know in some abstract, ontological, transhistorical way what “being Indian” is all about and on that basis devise strategies to hold on to that ideal identity, or do I – when faced with the circumstances of history – strategically practice Indian identity to maintain my uniqueness and resist anonymity through homogenization? For that matter, why can’t I be “Indian” without

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 having to be “authentically Indian”? What is the difference and how does it matter? In the diasporan context in the United States, ethnicity is often forced to take on the discourse of authenticity just to protect and maintain its space and history. (126–27)

Exhibiting to the Iranians of Los Angeles the Iranian they emulate and despise, Project Misplaced gestures to the ineffectiveness of the strategic deployments of Iranian identity that loudly proclaim the uniqueness of Iranian identity. Moreover, these deployments of Iranianness are ultimately turned inward to the Iranians in From the displaced to the misplaced 101 Los Angeles. The fear of loss is not as much about the possible loss of Iranian communal identity as the loss of a self that wants to be both Iranian and Ameri- can and is neither. The frozen time and space occupied by Ordoubadi are forms of containment of the self but they also become forms of confinement. But identity as a fixed construct has not always been desirable among Iranian Americans. In its beginnings, particularly, at the time of the hostage crisis, Iranians adopted various forms of subterfuge to avoid becoming the target of possible hostility. One telling reminder of this history is captured by Maryam Salari in her auto- biographical piece “Ed McMahon Is Iranian.” She recalls an incident from the time of the hostage crisis when she was five years old and the doorbell of their home in Florida rang, and when her mother answered the door, she was splashed with a paint bomb. Picking up on her parents’ consternation and intuiting that the red paint splashed on their front door was a mark of their identity as Iranians, the young Maryam asked her father why they had been targeted. The father attempted to explain that they had been mistakenly lumped together with the hostage tak- ers in Tehran. The child’s fears were not appeased. She did not want to be an Iranian, fearing that in school she would be singled out as an Iranian. She wanted to disavow her Iranian identity and be an American instead. When pointing to his daughter’s US birth as proof of her being an American produced no result, and the young Maryam responded that there were no other Iranians like her in the US, he resorted to an unusual measure:

My parents looked at each other for a painful second, then my dad looked up at the television – the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was on – desperate for an answer to my bold declaration “You are wrong,” he suddenly blurted out. “Dere are many Eyranians in de USA.” I looked up at him skeptically. “Like who?” I asked. Then he pointed to the fat man on the screen. “Heem, Ed MacMAHohn is Eyranian.” (151)

The ease with which the young Maryam accepted her father’s declaration points both to her desire to not be Iranian and the possibility of narrating identity differently. Ironically the child’s unwillingness to accept the possibility of having Iranian parents and also being American leads to the father’s bold manipulation

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 of Iranian identity and representing it as equally pliable. It is of note that Maryam Salari herself claims it took her decades to realize that Ed McMahon was not in fact Iranian. Returning to Mortazavi’s Project Misplaced , we might see Maryam Salari’s father as an instance of a misplacement that facilitates troubling the fixity of Ira- nian identity for his daughter. Dislodging certitude made it possible for the young girl to occupy Iranian and American identities not only in oppositional but also complementary terms. Mortazavi’s return to Iran enacts the possibility of flows and continuities between home and diaspora. The work he has done while residing in Iran appears 102 From the displaced to the misplaced to have retained the same critical gaze. As one commentator on the website Endjavi-Barbé Art Projects explains: “Houman’s handmade objects and his insistence on their flimsiness in the context of Iranian art (that was established on the basis of craftsmanship) can be considered a bold move. As such, he should be seen as a social activist and not merely a visual artist. He takes every opportunity to scorn pointless affectations and snobbism.”

Notes 1 Gharbzadegi , a term initially coined by the Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid and translated into English variously as “plagued by the West,” “Westitis,” “Occidentosis,” or “West-stricken.” 2 This is the English translation of the title of one of the chapters in Al-e Ahmad’s famous 1962 treatise, Gharbzadegi . 3 “Farsi” is the term used in Persian to refer to the standard language spoken in Iran. In English the language spoken in Iran is Persian. The use of “Farsi” in English is a direct importation from the native tongue and would be no different than Germans speaking of their language as “Deutsch.” 4 In a short story entitled, “Delayed Consequences of the Revolution,” Iraj Pezeshkzad depicts a group of older, upper-class Iranian exiles so frozen in time that they refuse to see their physical ailments as linked to their age: “[. . .] all physical ailments from weak eyesight and cataracts to hearing difficulties, hair loss, high blood pressure, arthritis, rheumatism, and even hernias were considered to be the consequences of the revolution and life in exile. If anyone dared to suggest the correlation between these ailments and their advanced age, they would be deeply offended” (109). 5 Sattar Khan is an Iranian national hero recognized for his pivotal role in the Constitu- tional Revolution of 1906–1911. 6 Kristeva writes: “Indeed, Freud wanted to demonstrate at the outset, on the basis of a semantic study of the German adjective heimlich and its antonym unheimlich that a negative meaning close to that of the antonym is already tied to the positive term, heimlich , ‘friendlily [sic ] comfortable,’ which would also signify ‘concealed, kept from sight,’ ‘deceitful and malicious,’ ‘behind someone’s back.’ Thus, in the very word Heimlich, the familiar and the intimate are reversed into their opposites, brought together with a contrary meaning of “uncanny strangeness” harbored in unheimlich . Such an imma- nence of the strange within the familiar is considered as an etymological proof of the psychoanalytic hypothesis according to which ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar,’ which as far as Freud was concerned, was confirmed by Schelling who said that ‘everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ ” (182–83).

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Works cited Al-e Ahmad, Jalal. Plagued by the West (Gharbzadegi). Trans. Paul Sprachman. Delmar, NY: Bibliotheca Persica 4. Caravan Books, 1981. Asayesh, Gelareh. “I Grew up Thinking I Was White.” In My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices. Ed. Lila Azam Zanganeh. Bos- ton: Beacon, 2006: 12–19. Bajoghli, Ramin. “Community (Re)Defined: Hailing Successes, Recognizing Failures.” Tehran Bureau , 10 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture . New York: Routledge, 1994. Endjavi-Barbé Art Projects , n.d. Web. 22 Dec. 2014. From the displaced to the misplaced 103 Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . New York: Grove, 1967. Homayounpour, Gohar. Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012. Kelley, Ron. “Wealth and Illusions of Wealth in the Los Angeles Iranian Community.” In Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles. Eds. Ron Kelley, Jonathan Friedlander, and Anita Colby. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993: 247–273. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves . Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia U P, 1991. Modarressi, Taghi. “Salman Rushdie and the Immigrant’s Dilemma.” Washington Post , 12 March 1989, x7. Mortazavi, Houman. Project Misplaced: The Rise and Fall of Simon Ordoubadi . Los Angeles: Printup Graphics, 2004. Naficy, Hamid. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles . Minne- apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Pezeshkzad, Iraj. “Delayed Consequences of the Revolution.” In Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. New York: Arcade, 2005: 105–113. Radhakrishnan, R. “Ethnicity in the Age of Diaspora.” In Theorizing Diaspora . Eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006: 119–131. Salari, Maryam. “Ed McMahon Is Iranian.” In A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. Eds. Persis Karim and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami. New York: George Braziller, 1999: 150–151. Shariati, Ali. What Is to Be Done: The Enlightened Thinkers and an Islamic Renaissance . Ed. Farhang Rajaee. Trans. A. Alidust and F. Rejaee. North Haledon, NJ: Islamic Publi- cations International, 1986. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 5 The hen’s husband, or deterritorializations of Persian

In the previous chapter we saw that translation, or more specifically translating oneself from Persian to English, is pivotal to the Iranian American’s integration in a new cultural setting. We encountered Simon Ordoubadi as the epitome of the self-assured immigrant deluded enough to believe himself bilingual and bicultural. “We son of king kouroush. We son of Roustam. We son of hope and tomorrow. We give you hafez and baba Taher All countrys want you, me, us. Even other countrys” reads a caption on one of Ordoubadi’s posters (81), attempting to translate a proud cultural legacy spanning Cyrus the Great (4th century BC ) and the Persian poets Baba Taher (11th century) and Hafez (14th century). The fictional Ordoubadi’s spotty English fails to convey his intent even as his cultural pride shines through. The message, mangled as it is in English, is rooted in historical realities amply and ably demonstrated by scholars of Iran1 and echoed in popularized myths about Ira- nians’ contribution to world history and culture. Ironically it is the exile’s attempt to translate this legacy and assert it in the American setting that gives it the veneer of absurdity. The loss could thus be attributed to a linguistic displacement, or to put it differently, to the fact that it is not uttered in Persian. As we have seen in previous chapters, Persian has long been held as the primary locus of Iranian identity. In this chapter I focus on the Persian language as a site of construction, dis- mantling, and reconstruction of Iranian identity. I will begin by recapping the salient views about Persian I have cited in the earlier chapters before turning to the work of the late Iranian immigrant writer Taghi Modarressi, his treatment of self-translation, and my own work as the translator of his posthumously published novel The Virgin of Solitude. I will end this chapter with a juxtaposition of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 novel and memories of my mother’s gradual loss of language due to dementia and the creative responses to which she resorted to maintain her image as a consummate raconteur. Modarressi provides a particularly interesting example of an Iranian immigrant writer for whom Persian remained the sole medium of literary expression. Yet he did not essentialize Persian and, perhaps because of his professional interests as a psychiatrist specializing in preverbal children, was fascinated by the opaqueness of language in general. Writing in Persian, as Modarressi demonstrates, does not necessarily secure a direct link to a monolithic Iranian identity. On the contrary, it can lay bare its own instability and contingency. The hen’s husband 105 To contextualize my analysis of Modarressi’s relationship to Persian, I would like to briefly revisit the convergence between Mortazavi’s satirical representation of an Iranian exile’s self-definition as inheritor of a continuous tradition from the pre-Islamic Persian empire and classical Persian poets and the Iranian intellectual Shahrokh Meskoob’s conceptualization of Iranian identity in Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language. The juxtaposition of a serious intellectual engagement with and a satirical treatment of culture might on the surface seem unsuitable. Despite their differing objectives, one aimed at preservation of a culture believed to be imperiled and the other intended as a critique of this diaspora community’s construction of culture, they are concerned with the fixity of the notion of culture. In his analysis, for instance, Meskoob also invokes links between pre-Islamic and the early modern Iran:

We suffered defeat in direct confrontation, in direct opposition and contest for political and social aims, for separatism from Arab victors, from the Baghdad Caliphate, and from the religion of Islam. But we achieved victory in the preservation of nationality and language. We maintained one nationality or, perhaps better put, our national identity, our Iranianness, through the blessing of language, by means of [the] vitality of Persian as a refuge. (31)

Leaving aside the anachronistic attribution of nationality (it would be possible and more precise to use a term other than nationality), Meskoob grounds Iranian identity in the Persian language. In fact, in his argument and that of other Iranian nationalists, language was and remains the vehicle for self-preservation. What is muted in Meskoob’s analysis is that New Persian, the language that emerged after the Arab conquest of Persia, adopted the Arabic alphabet, demonstrating how integral exchanges, flows, and translations were to the emergence of the Islamic world. Thus New Persian itself came into being through contact with Arabic. What Ehsan Yarshater points out about Islamic civilization can also be applied in reverse to Iranian language and civilization: “Islamic civilization was not the product of one people or one nation but the result of contributions made by the Arabs as well as all the conquered peoples” (61). As we saw in Chapter One, Persian also benefited from its encounter with Arabic. The language Pezeshkzad’s protagonist adopts in his conversations with the Arabs he encounters in his travels

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 to eighth-century Baghdad is an illustration of how many borrowed Arabic words are used in modern Persian. Mashallah’s “Arabic” is legible to the Iranian readers because the words to which he appends the Arabic definite article “al” exist in Persian as cognates. And yet the opposition posited between Persian and Ara- bic continues to hold sway in scholarship. For example, in his erudite and com- prehensive book The World of Persian Literary Humanism, Hamid Dabashi sees “Persian language as the lingua franca of cultural resistance to Arab imperialism” (103). He contends that the “masculinist aspect of the dominant Arabic culture” in the early phases of Islamic history “feminized Persian language and literature, character and culture” which rendered Persian the “feminine subconscious of a 106 The hen’s husband decidedly masculinist civilization” and “has given Persian literary humanism a subversive disposition by being ipso facto narrated from a hidden and denied, repressed, and thus paradoxically flamboyant and defiant vantage point” (ix). Dabashi recognizes that “Persian literary humanism has been achieved at the heavy cost of repressing, denying, dismissing, belittling, and denigrating the non- Persian elements within the Iranian cultural universe” (20). Persian still remains a category of being opposed to the non-Persian, raising a question not unlike the one we find in Montesquieu’s fictional Persian Letters : “ ‘How can one be Persian?’ ” (83). The context in which this question is posed by a fictional French character is that the visiting Persian having become tired of the attention his mode of dress draws has opted for European attire. He is almost entirely unnoticed until those with prior acquaintance of him point him out to others. Thus identified as a Persian, he overhears the famous question. What raises the curiosity of the French is the absence of visible means of embodying a Persian. But it also has a more abstract dimension that could be extended to the formulation of Persian and non- Persian. Put differently, what might be the necessary conditions under which one is identified or can self-identify as a Persian? There is an interesting response of sorts in a 1969 novel by F. M. Esfandi- ary, Identity Card, in which a transcultural Iranian is schooled in Persian, Arabic, English, and French. The novel revolves around the attempts of a young Iranian man, Daryoush Aryana, to obtain an identity card that would allow him to leave Iran. Having spent his formative years abroad, Aryana returns to his homeland and finds himself ill at ease in Tehran. He is unfamiliar with the local bureaucracy and is utterly lost when he is faced with the need to prove his Iranian identity before he can be issued an identity card. Ironically his family name, Aryana, evokes a recognizable form of affiliation in a country steeped in the myth of its “Aryan” ancestry. Instead, sent from one government office to another, Aryana finds himself caught in a bureaucratic nightmare. Unable to satisfy the demands for proof of his Iranian origins, he becomes a stateless person in his homeland and he is found dead at the end of the novel. A dream Aryana has in the course of his frustrating quest encapsulates the alienation he suffers:

I dreamt I was in the bazaar, or perhaps it wasn’t the bazaar – it was an old quarter, with dark, narrow alleys, as in the bazaar, and it was all deserted

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 and quiet. I was walking rapidly to reach a certain place, or find something, I don’t remember now what it was, but I kept losing my way. I would think I had found my way, but then suddenly realize I was in the wrong alley and I would get worried and run and run, and run. It seemed I was running the whole time, and I went around and around in a circle, and couldn’t get out of it. Then, I think I heard some people, perhaps they were friends, they were laughing and talking aloud in another alley, and I ran to catch up with them, but when I got to the next alley they weren’t there, and I heard them again in another alley, and I went after them again, as if we were all playing, what’s that game, hide and seek. As I was running, I heard my own voice from afar, The hen’s husband 107 and I stopped and laughed, perhaps worriedly, then I ran to catch up with my voice, but it eluded me and issues from somewhere else. I stopped to catch my breath and wondered how it could be that my voice had separated from my body. I think I then got worried and thought that at all costs, I must find my voice, put it back where it belongs, or I would be a body without a voice. Curious to see if now that my voice had decided to play hide and seek with me I could still utter a sound, I opened my mouth, and was shocked to see and hear, pouring volubly out of my mouth, and unintelligible, incoherent vapors of sound, in a language that defied comparison with anything I have ever heard. I tried to stop myself, struggled to close my mouth, but the gibberish oozed out of my skin, out of my pores, from all over my body. Thinking I was on fire, I ran and ran, and I think once again I was chasing my voice, which seemed to leap from alley to alley and I lost my way again and – I don’t think I remember any more. (68)

The desperate and endless search for his own voice and language, reflected in Aryana’s dream, highlights the unraveling of his hold on language as the primary means of being identified as an Iranian. His worst fear, not catching up with his voice, is surpassed in the nightmare; the voice he finds fails to produce a comprehensible language such that in his nightmare he remains disembodied and lost. The dream sequence echoes Aryana’s encounters with government officials in Tehran. When Aryana fills out an application for an identity card and submits it for processing, the official who reviews it becomes even more doubtful about his identity:

It’s just that, sitting here, listening to you I couldn’t help thinking – how shall I say – I couldn’t help thinking that something was not quite right. Please forgive me, but you see, your application written in a childish scrawl is full of mistakes, you speak with an accent, every other word you utter is English or French, you have been living abroad for God knows how long, you want to leave again hastily, very hastily, you don’t even know the year we are in – Mr. Engineer Janan told me this in passing the other day – and above all you have absolutely nothing to show that you were born here, or that your parents

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 were Iranian. (46)

This view of Iranian identity rules out the possibility of different modalities or degrees of affiliation, thus attributing to Iranianness an unbending uniformity and wholeness. The novel ends with Aryana’s body being found on a street in the old city, actualizing the impossibility of his belonging in Iran. The absence of forms of identification in Persian makes him stateless even in death. Documents found on the body are not of interest because they are written in “foreign” languages, as if Persian were the sole means of revealing the identity of the corpse. The 108 The hen’s husband identity card Aryana had sought in vain would have remained beyond his reach not because of the absence of official documents confirming his birth and origins but rather because his command of Persian would never entitle him to Iranianness. Esfandiary’s novel zeroes in on how Persian can be deployed as a means of exclusion and marginalization. The marginalized in this instance is not the non- Persian. When Identity Card was published, the intractability of the demarcation between Persian and non-Persian had not been fully put to the test. A mere decade and a half after the publication of this novel, the experience of linguistic disori- entation became a reality for countless Iranians who fled a revolution and a war. Their offspring who were born in or raised in the US or elsewhere abroad are now not unlike Aryana. While their parents found themselves – like Mashallah Khan, Maxx, and Simon Ordoubadi – in a world where Persian was far from the lingua franca, this next generation became hyphenated Iranians, Iranian-Americans in the US, for whom English is the primary medium of communication and creativity. And there are still others, like Taghi Modarressi, who had been living in the US before the mass migration of Iranians to it. Finding himself among Per- sian speakers drew him back to writing and to reflections on language, exile, and immigration. Modarressi made his literary debut with the publication of his first novel, Yako- lia and Her Loneliness, in 1955. He completed writing it within three months while he was a medical student at the University of Tehran and had taken a small position at a bank to support himself during his studies. A newly established publishing house, Nil, published the novel, which was awarded Sokhan magazine’s literary prize that same year. Modarressi left Iran in 1959 to continue his studies in medicine, specializing in child psychiatry and becoming a professor at the Uni- versity of Maryland. Interestingly, all along Modarressi’s passion had been for literature, which he had hoped to study at university. However “when it came time to enter university, he failed competitive exams in literature but passed the test for medical school and soon found himself attracted to psychiatry, as he indicated in an interview: “I felt there was a real connection between psychiatry and writing” (Steinbach 4J). The link between writing and psychiatry was muted during the years Modarressi devoted to settling into his new life and profession. The only significant literary work he published during that time was Sharif Jan, Sharif Jan (1961), a novel about the life of a traditional landowning family in a small town. It was not until after the 1979 revolution and the arrival of Iranians in the US that

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Modarressi returned to writing fiction. He published Ketab-e adamha-ye ghayeb [The Book of Absent People; 1986] and Adab-e ziyart [The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette; 1989]. Both novels appeared almost simultaneously in Iran and the US. The Persian originals were published in Iran, and his English translations appeared in the US. The concepts of estrangement and alienation are clearly signaled in the title of four of Modarressi’s five novels: From the “loneliness” of the first novel to the “absent people” of the second novel, to the “pilgrim’s” encounters with the unfamiliar and the unknown, and the “solitude” of the last novel, the titles give us a sense of what is to come. The existential condition explored in all of Modarressi’s The hen’s husband 109 works is nowhere more sharply delineated than in his first novel. Yakolia and Her Loneliness draws on biblical themes and tells the story of the protagonist Yako- lia’s expulsion from Jerusalem at the hands of her father, the king of Jerusalem. The father is fearful that the daughter’s love for a shepherd will adversely affect others and erode their singular devotion to the worship of God. During her wanderings in the desert and through her encounter with a benevolent Satan, Yakolia discovers that her own passion is motivated by a desire to escape the loneliness divinely ordained as the lot of all human beings. The loneliness she had sought to overcome is amplified in her homelessness. Interestingly the language Modarressi uses in his first novel is reminiscent of the first translation of the Old Testament into Persian and conveys at once remoteness and timelessness. Modarressi’s use of language in this first novel foreshadows what he would decades later call writing with an accent. The predetermined isolation and loneliness explored in Yakolia and Her Lone- liness is evident in Modarressi’s subsequent novels. For example, the protagonist of The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette, Hadi Besharat, a retired professor of ancient languages, is so lost in his pursuit of “dead languages and cultures” (15) that he does not notice how the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war affect his immediate reality. Reflecting on his wife’s criticism of his aloofness, he thinks to himself: “She was right. He had traveled the world over. But it occurred to him that he hadn’t moved even one step from the traffic intersection in his own district. How was it possible to wait at a traffic intersection for the length of a lifetime? Such immobility would stiffen a human being’s knees. Termites would eat the inside of his cane and turn it into dust. Instead of grass, a jungle would grow beneath his feet” (220). Besharat’s physical immobility is set against his continuous roaming in the realm of ideas, books, and music. He studies angels and the history of bygone eras and moves to an inner music: “Hadi Besharat listened to the pleasant symphony he had composed in September 1941. When he was alone he used to go to the corner of a little room he’d rented from Ramezan the ice seller and perform his symphony. He would put his imaginary violin on his shoulder and draw his bow across it” (227). What keeps Besharat aloof is the world of his imagination and his books. Modarressi takes up the idea of a language of interiority that both enables communication and is marked by estrangement in his 1990 essay “Writing with an Accent.” Speaking about a return journey to the US after a visit he had made to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Iran, he writes:

On the plane returning from Iran to the U.S., a strange idea kept occurring to me. I thought that most immigrants, regardless of the familial, social, or political circumstances causing their exile, have been cultural refugees all their lives. They leave because they feel like outsiders. Perhaps it is their personal language that can build a bridge between what is familiar and what is strange. They may then find it possible to generate new and revealing paradoxes. Here we have our juxtapositions and our transformation – the graceful and the awkward, the beautiful and the ugly, sitting side by side in a perpetual 110 The hen’s husband metamorphosis of one into the other. It is like the Hunchback of Notre Dame trying to be Prince Charming for strangers. (9)

The concept of a cultural refugee suggests an a priori alienation from one’s native language and culture that predates exile. Hadi Besharat is a personification of this type of inner exile. He too follows a personal language, which animates a movement between the self and the other. But in this equation the self is always already conscious of not being whole in his or her native tongue, or as the protagonist of The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette reads in a book of language instruction: “It is clear to the knowledgeable that each language possesses secrets, mysteries and special complexities not apparent even to those who speak it” (139). It is the illusion that the native speaker can experience full embodiment in his language that separates Besharat from his friends and relatives and also enables him to pursue the study of dead languages. Whether he lives in the everyday Persian of his neighborhood or pores over ancient texts, he is aware that he cannot fathom all their complexities and might well find himself an outsider and an exile. For Taghi Modarressi the understanding of this attenuated relationship to one’s mother tongue and other languages came gradually as part of his becoming an immigrant. In the same essay to which I have referred above, while discussing the image and assumptions he had about Europe and America, Modarressi writes:

In the spring of 1959, I flew from Tehran to Paris, on the first leg of my emigration to Wichita, Kansas, deep in the heart of what I used to call “Am-reeca.” It was a tearful parting. However, the closer I drew to Paris the more excited I became about the new venture. It was hard to believe that I was about to see the strange world that I knew only through literature. I felt I knew all that was worth knowing about the Western social order and politics. I understood the general trends in its literature and art. In short, I considered myself an insider. I must have lived there in a previous incarnation. (7)

Predictably this confidence about his knowledge of the other people and culture he encounters fades quickly, leaving him with a profound sense of insecurity about how to negotiate a vulnerable self. Recalling the first few years of life in

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 the US, Modarressi’s language conveys the gripping anxiety rooted in his fear of standing out: “I was afraid of breaking rules, offending social customs, or hurting people’s feelings. I went for a Sunday roller coaster ride and wrote home about the panic attacks that accompany entertainment of this kind. I practiced ‘Jingle Bells’ on Thanksgiving in preparation for Christmas” (8). The anxiety of being the outsider is counterbalanced by a desire to establish the possibility of transpar- ency and equivalence between Persian and English, suggesting that he had not yet grasped that his relationship to Persian was equally fraught:

If I wanted to say something, I compared Persian and English words, as dictionaries do. Persian and English words arranged themselves in two parallel The hen’s husband 111 lines like dancers in a nineteenth century ballroom, bowing to each other and trying to find a mate. I had not yet mastered a linguistic consciousness that I could consider my own. I knew that if I were to comprehend the new culture, it would not be enough to rely on memorized phrases. It was almost two decades before I managed to resurface from the avalanche of these new experiences. During this period, most of my time was spent on my professional training and on familiarizing myself with my new home. But internally I was silent and I felt no urge to write. (8)

The observance of boundaries between the self and the other and the courteous mutual recognition, indicators of the attempt to control and to gain mastery, prove futile. What facilitated Modarressi’s return to writing fiction was the arrival of the wave of Iranian immigrants and refugees in the wake of the 1979 revolution. It was the reinsertion of Persian, or more accurately the tonalities and affects surrounding the use of Persian that revived his passion for writing:

I found myself sitting once again with my friends, but this time we were not in Tehran. We were in Washington or Los Angeles. Once again, I was the happy captive audience to the fantasies of Iranian social theorists, with their spicy interpretations of daily events in Tehran, Paris, Washington, the Penta- gon, even the Oval Office. I was delightfully engulfed in rumors. [. . .] The excitement was almost unbearable. My feelings were so intense that I began to wake up every morning between four and five a.m., at which time I would drive to my office and work on a story that was actually an invented memoir. (8)

The return to a time that is beyond his own memory highlights the extent to which being immersed in Persian reconnected Modarressi to writing. Modarressi couples his return to writing with the discovery of what he calls a “new internal voice”:

I discovered it, unexpectedly, while listening to the sound of Persian in the streets of Los Angeles and Washington. It was the sound of Iranian refu-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 gees, bargaining in American shopping malls. My new voice did not have any content. It was more like rhythmic humming, perhaps a ghost of a Persian accent. It was like the humming we do when we are intrigued by an idea. At times, my mind was silent and the writing came to an unexpected halt. Then I hummed with my internal voice. That melodious Persian sound could sometimes throw light on forgotten scenes, bringing them out of total darkness and allowing me to invent memories of a time when I wasn’t even born. (8–9)

The absence of “content” in this new internal voice and the “humming” quality of it suggest an affective dimension which resonates with his work on pre- or 112 The hen’s husband nonverbal communication reminiscent of Hadi Besharat’s symphony. This is hardly a return to an embodiment in language. Rather it signals a new way of relating to Persian, a license to explore its ghostliness. It is not surprising that the first novel Modarressi wrote after years of “silence” is entitled The Book of Absent People and is haunted by ghosts of the past. The conjunction is manifest in a passage that describes the protagonist, Rokni, speaking a defamiliarized Persian and encountering the ghost of a long-dead relative:

Now, my family says this is just more of my showing off, something to make me seem dramatic – a self-indulgence, like my habit of talking as if I were reading from [an] ancient tale – but the truth of the matter is, that night eleven years ago I was inspired to take the hurricane lamp from the niche, climb the stairs, and go to the rooftop. In the middle of the stairs, I was overcome by the sensation of a presence. A few steps higher stood Homayundokht, God forgive her soul, with a green umbrella in her hand. (29)

The language Rokni speaks after witnessing Homayundokht’s return from the world of the dead is not merely marked by his fear. It becomes the means of conveying otherworldly presences amidst seemingly commonplace events. In other words, rather than making communication transparent and lucid, language leads to further mystifications. In addition to drawing Modarressi back to writing fiction in Persian, his “internal voice” enabled him to create unique translations of his own novels. His approach was marked by relying on literal translations rather than finding equivalent idiomatic expressions in English. In terms of translation theory, Modarressi could be said to embrace the concept of foreignization. The two paradigms of domestication and foreignization refer to the translator’s adherence to the target language in the former and to the source language in the latter. Domestication would lead to a translation that reads fluently in English, and foreignization would result in making visible the linguistic and cultural differences of the Persian text.2 Modarressi peppered his English translations of his novels with phrases that would serve as reminders of the original Persian. Particularly in translations of idiomatic expressions from Persian into English, he did not opt for equivalents. Instead, for instance, when referring to someone who has lost his power or influ-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ence, he wrote: “nobody chopped any chives for him” (Pilgrim 17), or to capture the intensity of the rage experienced by a character, he relied on a literal translation from Persian: “My Khan Papa Doctor was so angry that if you’d stuck him with a knife he wouldn’t have bled” (Book 19). In some instances, the reader unfamiliar with Persian would not necessarily be at a loss for meaning. The context helps the reader decipher a general sense of what is implied. But in his translations of The Book of Absent People and The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette , there remain countless examples that are not readily comprehensible and produce a stronger sense of the foreign: “In Paris, if you hit any dog on the head a hundred paint- ers fall off, big and little, and the Master Assar wouldn’t be able to keep up with The hen’s husband 113 the dust of a one of them” (Book 116) or “If the news reaches the mosque, then you’ll have to bring an ass to carry all the rumors” (Pilgrim 96). The preponder- ance of literal translations produces a secondary effect of making English strange or, to borrow from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, puts English in the service of a “minor literature” whose “first characteristic [. . .] is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16). Disrupting the degree to which English is automatically associated, in the case of the target audience of Modarressi’s English translations of his own novels, with native speakers in the US, Modarressi refuses to fuse English and Persian or to bring them closer to one another, but rather to foreground the limits of translatability. In his Translating the Garden, Ghanoonparvar conceptualizes this as “in practice every translation is inevitably a failure, with occasional moments of success” (2). The trope of the near impossibility of complete cultural transplantation or translation appears in Modarressi’s penultimate novel, The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette, in the image of a quince-orange tree, a graft between a quince and an orange tree:

To be sure, there are common features between the Easterner and the West- erner, and in certain respects each benefit[s] the other. But in the end their encounters remain barren. It’s like the quince-orange tree, which is a graft between a quince and an orange tree, or the mule, which is the result of horse- and-donkey copulation. Of course each has some use. But they themselves are barren and fruitless. (8)

Ironically the very passage in which Besharat tells his American colleague about the impossibility of grafting cultures betrays a level of displacement in Modar- ressi’s own language and memory. Most Iranians associate the combination of quince and orange, or to be more precise, lemon, with a drink made from syrup that amalgamates the quince and the lemon. The graft Modarressi includes in his novel is of his own making. In the process of bridging between Persian and English, between his cultural memories and conveying them to the readers of his English translation, two transformations can be seen taking place. The syrup made of the fruit of two trees, quince and lemon, becomes transmuted into a tree, and the lemon of the original Persian becomes displaced by orange. The metaphor of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 the barren encounter between East and West opens onto another layer of “deterritorialization” of his native Persian. Seen from this perspective, writing with an accent does not refer only to Modarressi’s translation of his own novels into English, but also extends to his relationship to Persian. My experience of translating the late Taghi Modarressi’s last novel, Azraye khalvat neshin [The Virgin of Solitude], which he completed before succumbing to chronic lymphoma in April 1997, brought me face to face with other similar instances. When Modarressi’s wife, Anne Tyler, commissioned this translation, I had little knowledge of the complexities I would encounter in the process and the depths of understanding this work would take me to. 114 The hen’s husband In the initial stages, I was beset by formal concerns of finding the right balance between foreignizing and domestication and believing a balance of sorts possible. Working from an unpublished manuscript, since Modarressi had not had time to edit and refine the Persian original for publication, drew me deeper into the types of anxieties Doug Robinson highlights and I could not successfully repress:

We think about translation in narrow, restrictive, conceptually confusing, and contradictory ways and find it difficult to break out of these ways and think about translation differently because we have been programmed to think about it through them; and our bodies resist any move beyond our programming and indicate their displeasure with our “deviant” or “rebellious” behavior with somatic anxiety signals, a tightness in the throat or chest, a racing pulse, etc. (xi–xii)

I realized that I had to grapple with my relationship not only to how I would translate from Persian into English but also how to relate Modarressi’s notion of “writing with an accent” to the Persian original. To borrow from M. R. Ghanoon- parvar, I had to translate the novel into English to understand it in Persian.3 In my search for an approach to translating Modarressi, I found an important link to his work as a child psychiatrist. In opposition to the perfect pairing of words Modarressi first sought in dictionaries, his work as a child psychiatrist immersed him in a world free from words but rife with the possibility of communication. When he was asked in an interview how he could treat children who do not yet speak, he responded: “But babies can talk. [. . .] In fact, babies are experts in communication. . . . The language of babies is feelings. And babies are able to create or reflect feelings around them. By action, by a smile, by posture, by gesture, they communicate” (Steinbach 4J). The language of feelings and gestures provides a means of communication, but as Modarressi points out in the same interview, it relies on approximation, vagueness, and guesswork. Language might well be part of the process of communication between adults and preverbal children, but its centrality is less evident. The internal silence Modarressi felt during this time is perhaps linked to the “avalanche” of experiences with nonverbal communication. Interestingly Modarressi does not suggest that his work as a psychiatrist prevented him from having access to Persian. Instead he speaks of a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 distance vis-à-vis writing in Persian. And this distance became more apparent as I began translating from his Persian text into English. The position Modarressi occupied as an insider and outsider in relation to his native Persian and his adopted English placed him in a constant movement between “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” of Persian and English, creating a type of “minor literature” in the sense defined by Deleuze and Guattari: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). It was my work as translator and editor of Modarressi’s novel that made me grasp how Modarressi became “a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to [his] own language” (19). The hen’s husband 115 Thinking beyond the programmed and the paradigmatic, I could shuttle between the Persian and the English as I realized that I was engaged in a dual task of “translating” both the Persian and the English for different communities of readers. Anne Tyler’s involvement in this process, her insights into the editing of the original, and our exchanges about the novel and its many characters enabled me to release myself from the straitjacket of having to conform to a narrow method. When I listened to Anne read aloud from my translation I could hear something beyond the specific choice of words and phrases which reminded me of Modar- ressi’s own attentiveness to what exceeded the verbal and was always highlighted in his work. As I ruminated on Modarressi’s works in fiction and psychiatry, I was reminded of the epigraph he had chosen for his third novel, The Book of Absent People . Citing verses from the twelfth-century mystical tale by Farid al- din ‘Attar, Conference of the Birds, Modarressi invokes a journey necessitating the acquisition of a new mode of communication:

Oh, may your journey to the border of Sheba be happy. May your speaking the language of birds with Solomon be happy. Hold back the demon in chains and in prison So you will be the keeper of the secret like Solomon.

The demon I had to hold back in my immersion in Modarressi’s work was to step outside the boundaries of the manuscript I was translating to better grasp the many accents, registers, and layers in his life and work. I pored over letters he had written to me and remembered telephone conversations we had had and anecdotes he had shared with me. The obliqueness of Modarressi’s relationship to Persian and English is captured in a story I heard him tell on the occasion of my last visit with him at his home in February 1997. One evening during that visit, Taghi Modarressi, Anne Tyler, and I had been talking about Modarressi having continued to write his fiction in Persian rather than experimenting with English. He maintained on this occasion, as he had in the past, that there was no other language in which he could write fiction. In his typical self-deprecating manner he repeated that he could barely handle his mother tongue, Persian, let alone English as his new medium of literary expression. He made fun of his own occasional slips in Persian, which reminded him of Iranian compatriots who after a short period of stay in North America or Europe

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 returned to Iran and appeared to have forgotten much of their native tongue. The Modarressis recalled an anecdote from a visit to Iran they made together and their encounter with an Iranian who had lost his grip on Persian after a recent move to the US. The anecdote I heard that night recalled a gathering in Tehran the Modar- ressis had attended years earlier. In the course of a conversation in Tehran, a recent returnee from the US struggled to remember the Persian word khoroos , rooster. After many attempts at coming up with the right Persian word, the man found an ingenious solution: he turned to his fellow Iranians and said, “I am looking for the Persian word for the hen’s husband. What do we call him in Persian?” 116 The hen’s husband This anecdote had particular resonances for Modarressi. On one level, it captures the affectations of the Westernized Iranians who have become a type in modern Persian literature. Hasan Moghadam’s 1922 comic play Ja’far Kahn az farang amadeh [Ja’far Khan Is Back from Europe] offers up an amusing example of an Iranian character whose spoken Persian is peppered with foreign words that have apparently dislodged his native Persian. This is how Ja’far Khan speaks when he first appears on stage: “Oh, enfin we made it. But what a trip! But what dust and germs we inhaled! (Dusting off his shoes and hat, he places his hat on the table and turns to his puppy) Ici, Carotte !” (8–9). We find the same type in Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh’s famous short story “Persian Is Sugar.”4 Like his literary predecessors, Modarressi viewed the sudden loss of language on the part of Iranians who traveled to the West as puzzling and laughed it off as a sign of a condition well recognized in modern Persian as gharbzadegi . But there was another layer of associations manifest in Modarressi’s discussion of his own Persian, which I understood better in the process of translating The Virgin of Solitude . The loss of language, which Modarressi signaled in his recitation of the anecdote and is made evident in the Persian text of his last novel, is not an affected or conscious self-representation of a Westernized Iranian, but rather is an inevitable outcome of using a language in isolation away from the native context. This process is more gradual and results in transformations associated with slippages, mistakes, and losses. There is an echo of this type of change affecting the language of the immigrant in Modarressi’s essay “Writing with an Accent.” Instead of speaking of the barren encounter of the Easterner and Westerner, he chooses “transformation” and “paradox” and the juxtaposition of the graceful and the awkward. Something of the encounter is communicated, but the emphasis is not so much on the content or substance but rather the movement that leads from one linguistic and cultural realm into another and back. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari: “The problem is not that of being free but of finding a way out, or even a way in, another side, a hallway, an adjacency” (7–8). The entry Modarressi’s characters find bears witness to the potentialities of the encounters between languages to create a new zone in which the naturalness of both languages is challenged. Beyond the immigrant’s relationship to his mother tongue I had sensed something of Modarressi’s anxiety about how his illness or perhaps age and distance had affected his language. In my denial of any vulnerability on Modarressi’s part, I had dismissed any possibility that he had more than a “perfect” command of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Persian and focused instead on the culturally specific affectations I could handle through humor. There are other layers of estrangement and loss in the anecdote Modarressi told me and evident in his literary works. Modarressi’s trajectory as a writer and his decision to study psychiatry illuminates his preoccupation with the alienation of the human subject from the self, the community, and by extension language and culture. In The Virgin of Solitude , we meet a protagonist whose sense of loneliness and estrangement makes him subject to irresistible movement through space and time. At the age of twelve, the young protagonist, Nuri, along with his sister, moves into his grandparents’ house after his father is killed in a car accident and his The hen’s husband 117 mother moves to New York. It is Nuri’s life in the Dezashibi house we follow in the novel. Nuri’s grandfather is from old aristocracy and has worked his way into the Pahlavi establishment by becoming a senator. For the young Nuri, his Austrian grandmother is a source of immense mystery. After many years of living in Iran and speaking Persian, even the closest members of the family call her Madame. This is a sign of respect, but it becomes a perennial reminder of her being different. Nuri wants to know more about his grandmother and avails himself of every possible opportunity to steal into her clothing storage room. What he finds there are remnants of Madame’s life in Vienna, her past as a cabaret singer. Nuri is too young to put together a picture of his grandmother’s youth, and the snippets of the past she shares with him intensify the mysteries surrounding Madame’s past:

Madame had talked about a trip she had taken to Prague in 1939 with her friend Princess Bertha. She did not explain where or how Princess Bertha had become a princess. With vague allusions and broad hints, Madame made Princess Bertha into an imaginary creature for Nuri. She had been born somewhere, perhaps in Odessa, to a Russian nobleman’s family. She had many tutors and nannies who taught her English, French, German, piano, ballet, and singing. In the heat of the Russian Revolution, her family put all their belongings in a basement storeroom, stashed their fur coats in a gap between two walls, and with a thousand hardships made their way to Vienna. Madame related all this very fast, fluttering her fingers to indicate she wished to pass over these unimportant events and reach the passionate love story between Princess Bertha and a young Austrian named Siegfried von Friedhoff. (9–10)

The details Madame overlooks become the very objects of fascination for Nuri and force “him to be in two different places at once, overcoming limitations of time and space” (9). Madame’s reminiscences indoctrinate Nuri into the constant movement between different planes of reality and the ever-shifting boundaries between the here-and-now and the fanciful past, the Persian and the German that Madame and her erstwhile friends would have spoken. Madame’s own transformation from a German cabaret singer to the wife of a respected senator and her decision to learn Persian and immerse herself in the customs and religion of her new home point to seemingly endless possibilities for self-transformation. But

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Madame’s Persian serves as a reminder of her being an outsider to Persian. She speaks a very formal, albeit accented Persian: “She had learned from books to refer to herself as ‘your humble servant’ and to others as ‘Your Honor’ or ‘Your Excellency.’ Even in ordinary speech, she used the old bureaucratic style” (13). The reams of proverbs and verses she has memorized she casually throws into conversation, making it difficult for Nuri to understand and know her:

Your servant has devoted much love to your literature. I have breathed in much smoke from the burning lamp by which I had to read; my bright days became dark like night, and my dark nights became brightened until I 118 The hen’s husband memorized more than a thousand verses and Persian parables. I bet that I too, like Allameh Ghazvini, will someday glorify into print corrected handwritten manuscripts. From olden days, great Iranian men have said that the more we want, the more we expose ourselves to danger. But your servant believes that the more greedy I am, the more alive I feel. The more I enjoy myself. (36)

Despite her efforts, Madame’s Persian is marked by deterritorialization and serves to underline what separates her from the native speakers far less concerned with mastering its depth and breadth. Her fascination with Persian is not unlike Nuri’s desire to know and understand her Austrian past. As Nuri grows older he develops a fondness for Madame’s bizarre Persian and enters into a different relationship with her. Toward the end of the novel, when Madame becomes ill, she begins to lose control of her Persian:

She reached out to hug Nuri, but stumbled. “I am glad you came, my dearrr. Whenever you catch a fish out of water it is fresh. Did I say it right? Please correct me, if I made a mistake. When you catch a fish, what do you do with it?” Nuri did not answer. Madame continued, “My knowledge of Persian is shrinking by the day. But don’t worry. Thanks to selfless and generous friends I’ll learn it again.” She spoke hurriedly, “How funny that I have forgotten Persian sayings and poems.” (341)

Madame clings desperately to her knowledge of Persian and to prove her complete commitment to her new home, she converts to Islam. This conversion, like the graft between a quince and an orange, does not rescue her from an isolation that has become part of the fabric of her being. Her accented and artificial Persian attest to this impermeable alterity. Replicating the flavor of Madame’s Persian in my English translation was not as complicated as the choices I had to make when I was faced with puzzling inconsistencies in the language of the narrator or characters who are represented as native speakers of Persian of the era just before the 1979 revolution. One example, in many ways akin to the quince-orange tree, is particularly striking. This case is linked to an expression in Persian I recalled differently from what

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 I encountered in the Persian manuscript of the novel. The expression refers to a character collapsing onto a chair, or falling apart. I had remembered that in Persian the saying was to fall apart like plum jam, plum being a fruit that would typically not retain its full shape when it is cooked. But in the novel, the expression was rendered as “falling apart like sour cherry jam” (morabbaye albalu ). The similarities between the words for plum and sour cherry in Persian, alu and albalu , could well explain the replacement of one word with another. When dealing with these types of issues in the course of translating Modarressi’s novel, I was reminded of how central the sounds of Persian were to his rediscovery of a voice in Persian. If this sudden immersion in Persian provided Modarressi with the impetus to hear The hen’s husband 119 an internal voice in Persian, it also was a voice that echoed distance and dislocation. Not surprisingly the distance manifests itself in words getting transposed, dates becoming blurred, or customs being forgotten. Modarressi’s relationship to English was marked by a different level of impenetrability. Whether he wrote in Persian or translated his own writing into English, he remained an outsider and occasionally had to pause and wonder what the word was for a hen’s husband. Communicating these levels of deterritorialization to the readers of his novels, be it in Persian or in English, Modarressi invites us to ponder an experience not unlike that invoked in the verses by Mowlana Jalal al-din Rumi recalled in The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette :

With the next fit, I’ll die from being human. I’ll grow angel wings and feathers. Once again, I’ll soar above the angels And I’ll become that which is beyond imagining . . . (5)

As reader, editor, and translator of Azraye khalvat neshin , I could not have imagined the transformative potential of these experiences. Translating the novel became the work of grieving and coming to terms with my loss. And the translation helped me grasp how all forms of communication entail some degree of translation and an accompanying sense of disjuncture and loss. Extending these insights to how Persian has been imagined as the cornerstone of Iranian identity makes it possible to imagine more attenuated forms of affiliation through language. If Persian can be thought of as the language of both cultural preservation and belonging, it can also serve as a marker of fading affiliations. In The Virgin of Solitude, Madame, who prides herself on her Persian, finds her knowledge fading. In the advanced stages of her illness, she tells Nuri: “ ‘My knowledge of Persian is shrinking by the day. But don’t worry. Thanks to selfless and generous friends I’ll learn it again.’ She spoke hurriedly, ‘How funny that I have forgotten Persian sayings and poems’ ” (341). As Madame succumbs to can- cer, she clings to her idea of having become accepted as a Muslim and an Iranian: “Madame cheered up. ‘Yes, my dearrr, this is my home. I like it very much.’ She nodded her head. ‘What a pleasant place it is! There is no God but God . . .’ ” (353). And yet her wish to be buried among fellow Muslims is met with one obstacle after another. Her body is not permitted to be taken to the mosque as part of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Muslim rites of burial. Her corpse is declared “unclean.” And the designation, despite Madame’s conversion to Islam, is reserved for non-Muslims: “ ‘We have our own customs and rituals that we must safeguard against foreign contamination. Call the Coroner’s Office, ask them for the address of the Armenian cemetery, and take Madame Farideh there. I promise Madame Farideh’s soul will be much hap- pier. They have their own more elaborate rituals’ ” (354). This final banishment of Madame culminates in Nuri secretly taking her corpse to an Armenian cemetery for her burial, witnessed by a handful of strangers who had never known her. The impossibility of holding a Muslim burial for Madame, her clandestine burial in an Armenian cemetery attended only by Nuri and Armenians who never 120 The hen’s husband knew her, and the remoteness of the cemetery reinforce Madame’s banishment from the heart of the family and the community she had cultivated. The only community that accepts her is the Armenian, who themselves are a minority: “They carried Madame’s coffin to the altar and removed the lid. The organ played a sad tune. The semidark interior of the church was permeated with the smell of wax and incense. The weak lantern light made Madame’s body resemble the Virgin of Solitude” (366). The similarity between Madame’s body and the statue of the Virgin Madame had bought from a Polish priest at St. Bartholomew’s Church the first year she’d arrived in Iran reminds Nuri of his childhood image of Madame and her mysterious aura, particularly when she prayed to the Virgin of Solitude: “When she knelt before it, bit by bit she would become transformed into one of those strange creatures Nuri and Ladan had seen only in the movies about the supernatural. Sometimes they imagined the Virgin of Solitude as a living person who was closely related to Madame herself. The language in which she spoke to Madame was different from ordinary languages such as Persian and German, and no one could decipher it” (11). They liken this imagined language to a secret language they shared as children and left their relatives mystified. This ineffable language of Nuri and Ladan’s imagination is reminiscent of Hadi Besharat’s symphony and the internal voice Modarressi associates with the language of exile. It is only after Madame’s death that Nuri finds the link between his own sense of being out of place and the significance of the Virgin of Solitude for Madame. When he returns one last time to Madame’s gravesite, he grasps what had eluded him earlier: “Madame’s grave was covered with damp brown dirt. No blossoms decorated it. Nuri took off his jacket and threw it over his shoulder. He had finally attained what he had always longed for. He felt deeply connected to Madame” (368). This new bond transcends the boundaries of language, religion, and nationality, but it is also limited to an inner world that might well remain out of sync with others. Thus for a country in the throes of redefining itself as a unified Muslim nation, Madame will be “unclean” and barred from the newly configured nation. Like Aryana, Madame is stripped of any sense of affiliation with Persia, in which she had believed to have made her home. Aryana represents impurities of another kind. His language lacks the purity and fullness that would entitle him to be acknowledged as an Iranian. Despite radical differences in the operative concept of Iranianness in the two historical and cultural moments that serve as the background of Modarressi and Esfandiary’s novels, there remains a fundamental drive

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 for purity and wholeness of the national sense of belonging. Its persistence and appearance in different guises, the novels suggest, lead to forms of inner exile. The national language, the very vehicle for cultural preservation and continuity, becomes a means for exclusion and expulsion. From this vantage point, the conditions for imagining a unified and immutable Iranian culture should give us pause. There is yet another layer of deterritorialization in Modarressi’s reflections on language and the anecdote about an Iranian who has forgotten his native tongue after spending time in the US: the loss of language instigated by illness. Madame’s disintegrating health, as we have seen, produces anxieties in her about losing her command of Persian. Modarressi’s anxiety about his own loosening The hen’s husband 121 grip on Persian is refracted in the anecdote about forgetting the Persian word for rooster. The presumed affectation that makes the anecdote humorous suggests that a fading relationship to the mother tongue can be restored. But laughing at the anecdote can convey both acknowledgment of the inviolability of Persian and anxiety, particularly among displaced Iranians, about becoming the type held up for ridicule. As Modarressi’s translator I could maintain an oblique relationship to the types of linguistic deterritorializations I encountered in the language of the characters as well as that of the narrator. But, years after I had completed the translation of Modarressi’s novel, witnessing the gradual loss of language my mother experienced due to dementia introduced me to a different apprehension about loss of language that limited the possibility of restoring oneself in any language. Translation of the kind my mother and I employed during the last stages of her illness left nothing inviolable in Persian. My mother’s cognitive decline was so gradual that it could be easily dismissed as symptoms of aging. At first her relationship to dates was strained. In our telephone conversations, she would ask me if a trip I had planned for months later had gone well. The very mention of a future trip seemed to scramble her mental calendar. Apart from relegating this to her advancing years, I also saw it as an extension of her perennial worry about her daughters’ comings and goings. I was so focused on avoiding any mention of events in the future that I did not notice her increasing reliance on the word “thing,” in Persian chiz , for names, expressions, and terms that escaped her. The proliferation of chiz in her speech gave our telephone conversations the flavor of a puzzle. I would try to guess the missing word from the context, and with practice I became more adept at filling in the blanks for her. But there were times, particularly when she would describe an object and ask me for its name, I had to remind myself that my mother was a native speaker of Persian. Eerily reminiscent of Madame’s questions to Nuri, these exchanges were very unsettling to me. And yet it seemed far easier to slip into denial than admit that my mother was suffering memory loss. The signs I could ignore when our only contact was through the telephone became unavoidable when she began living with us. Spending half of the year in California with me and the other half in Canada with my sister exposed us all to other kinds of lacunae in her memory. At the beginning of the four years that our mother moved back and forth between my sister’s place and mine, she would occasionally forget names or scramble days of the week. But there were also hal-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 lucinations she experienced before falling asleep. When she narrated them, she depicted vivid images that could be static or moving. If I asked her whether they bothered her, she would tell me that all she had to do to get rid of them was to open her eyes. It was difficult not to take this apparent mastery of hallucinations as proof that, occasional slips of memory notwithstanding, she was still in command of her faculties. Even when she began sleepwalking, she had cogent explanations for her wanderings. On one occasion, she told me, she had heard her mother ask her for a glass of water and she had gotten out of bed to fetch it. But when she opened her eyes and saw that she was in our kitchen instead of her mother’s, she declared that she had had a dream. I came to believe that even dementia could not rob my 122 The hen’s husband mother of her characteristic self-possession. But, as I learned, this display of mastery hinged on her delivering her dream to a receptive audience. The mornings I was not rushed to get to work and could listen to her “dreams,” she would be far more settled. Frequently as she described segments of a dream that did not make sense, she would be overcome with mirth, a cue for me to laugh along with her and make light of the absurdity of the dreams that over time seeped into her sense of reality. At this earlier stage of her condition, my mother was capable of drawing on her skills as a storyteller to overcome her anxiety about “losing her mind.” The very act of narrating her nocturnal visions enabled her to surmount them, assuring both of us that the very mind that produced the visions had the capacity to dismiss them as illusions. But her struggle for mastery was evident in other ways. As an avid reader of fiction and an amateur of classical Persian poetry who could recite entire poems from memory, she would occasionally pause in the middle of a recitation and tell us that her memory was slipping. Such moments were difficult to witness because my mother’s relationship to language, poetry, and fiction was a key component of her public persona and her pride. Throughout her career as an elementary and high school teacher and principal, she had stood out for her enviable ability to cite the most befitting verses in any situation. Even more impressively, her repertoire of bon mots included Azeri (the language of the Republic of Azerbaijan) and Gilaki (the language spoken in the province of Gilan bordering on the Caspian Sea). If her audience did not understand Azeri or Gilaki, she was quick to offer the Persian equivalent. In the years that she lived with me, her capabilities as her own sequential translator compensated for other deficien- cies. When I was her sole audience, her shuttling between languages, particularly those I did not understand as well as Persian, restored a balance to the increasing physical and cognitive dependency she was developing on me. When I was the one who needed her as a translator, she would resume what she considered her rightful place vis-à-vis her daughter. I was not always mindful of her need to maintain a sense of self not affected by physical and cognitive deterioration. But even on those occasions, she could recall appropriate anecdotes. Once when she was particularly frustrated with my prompting her to do something, she told me this anecdote in Gilaki. A man strolling in a bazaar suddenly hears a commotion. He inquires about its source and is told that a thief has just made off with a merchant’s money and bystanders are trying to catch the thief. Eager to be of help, the man follows in pursuit as well and is so agile that he actu-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 ally outruns the thief. He stops, turns back to the thief, and asks him: “Were you supposed to catch me, or was I supposed to catch you?” I did not need an interpretation or translation to get the gist of what she wanted to tell me. I recall this anecdote because of the way it communicates positioning in space as a marker of one’s function. As dementia closed in on my mother, she fought to maintain a befitting position in relation to her daughters as well as others. In these skirmishes, language was her most powerful weapon. Fortunately for her, with the exception of the last few months she was spared the indignity of complete loss of language. As her ability to read and speak eroded, she did not give in. Instead she found imaginative rationalizations. Her passion for reading novels was a constant, but The hen’s husband 123 when she began rereading novels she had already read, she told me that the books I got from the library had additional pages inserted in them after they were returned. Sometimes, she told me, whole new chapters she had not read were added. One of the more painful moments was when a second cousin who had always asked my mother to do an augury from the Divan of Hafiz, as it is customary to make a wish and call upon the poet Hafiz to offer guidance, we waited for mother to read aloud the poem on which the page opened. After stumbling over a couple of words, she squinted at the page before looking up at me and declaring that the book had been dropped in water, causing the ink to run. On another occasion, she asked me to fetch her other set of glasses because she could not see the printed words well. I took my cues from her until I could no longer decipher her words. It seemed the change happened overnight, but in reality there had been plenty of indications earlier. She began hearing Gilaki or Azeri when English or other languages she did not know were spoken. After a visit to a nail salon, she told me that a young man who worked there was Azeri but apparently embarrassed to own up to his true identity. The process by which my mother had arrived at this conclusion was quite straightforward: having ascertained that he was speaking to fellow workers in Azeri, she addressed him in Azeri, but instead of answering her, he lowered his head in shame. When I feigned surprise because I knew that the salon was owned and operated by Vietnamese, she was not fazed and forged ahead with her discourse on the internalized sense of inferiority common among the Azeri. There was something empowering in the way her imaginary had reterri- torialized Canadians and Americans as fellow countrymen and made them native speakers of languages she knew. The diverse ethnicities and languages of North America became synonymous with her multilingual experiences of Iran and gave a new sense of home to alien territories she had not chosen willingly. This phase of the disease lasted a short period of time before her speech changed drastically. In the last three months when she was living with my sister, I still called her every day. In one such conversation she spoke at length and I understood very little of what she said. When she asked me if I got it, I mumbled something about the phone line. Apparently I was not a match for her use of subterfuge. She suggested that instead I phone a cousin in Iran who could explain it to me. That to make sense of her message I had to call Iran seemed to me an apt means of self- assertion. Her Persian, incomprehensible as it was to me, could be made whole at its rightful home.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Home and homelessness became the dominant metaphors through which she communicated with us in the last three weeks of her life when she was hospital- ized. When we were in the emergency room, she reached for the bars on the sides of her bed and uttered the word zendan [prison]. In an amalgam of Persian, Azeri, Gilaki, and occasionally a word or two of Russian, she begged to be released. Too frail to walk without assistance, she did not tire of looking for exits. The space she could not escape ultimately became a cemetery to which she imagined she had been banished. The sites she now inhabited in her imaginary became increasingly more confining as her ability to communicate with us diminished. It was futile to dispute her certainty that she spent the night at a cemetery. What she saw and 124 The hen’s husband related to us was her own approaching death. The stories she told us about what had transpired were as much products of dementia as her imagination’s paving the way for the end. It was as if she followed the pilgrim’s rules of etiquette that Hadi Besharat’s father counsels him about: “A human being is only a pilgrim pursuing a destination! He must be thoroughly familiar with the pilgrim’s rules of etiquette” (92). Stripped of her masterful command of languages, my mother found other means of self-assertion. The only sources of comfort to her were recollections of the past she was eager to share with us. But this sharing required that we become her interpret- ers. Unwilling to accept her loss of language, she demanded more proficiency from her translators. Her need to remember and retell her memories, however fragmented they became, persisted. Even as fragments of one memory seeped into another and the storylines blended, she demanded an attentive audience, as if she wanted to control the narrative of her life to the very end. Persian, Gilaki, and Azeri, languages in which she used to possess native fluency, lost their sanctity and became interchangeable with any other means of communication. As dementia slowly hollowed out the very concept of native fluency, she spoke a cacophony of sounds made out of occasionally recognizable words and phrases. To her own ears she remained intelligible, as if she were speaking yet another language she had mastered. These recollections of my mother’s experiences capture extreme and troubling forms of loss of language. But they also underscore how these losses are accompanied with rationalizations and reterritorialization. At times my mother’s self- assured but incomprehensible proclamations reminded me of Mashallah Khan’s confident, albeit misplaced, handling of Arabic during his journeys to the past, or Simon Ordoubadi’s proud but flawed self-portrayals in Persian and English. The illusions undergirding these real and fictional instances of linguistic proficiency and prowess do not eclipse the legacy of the Persian language, but they offer counterpoints to the most egregious essentializations of Persian as the immutable and privileged means of access to Iranianness. Persian has served as the primary vehicle for expressions of cultural identity, but it is far from the only language spoken in Iran. Nor has it been immune from the inevitable transformations that all languages undergo over time. The anxiety that first-generation Iranian immigrants feel about their children’s inability to speak and write Persian is another dimension of the concern about the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 fate of Persian. It is not uncommon to hear Iranian Americans confront the reality of their offspring showing no desire to become fluent in Persian. It is understandable that parents fear English replacing Persian as their means of communication with their children. And yet it can also be viewed as a loss that precedes juxtapositions and transformations that exceed normative expectations of collective identity. If Persian language and literature have been subject to deliberate and new reconfigurations, perhaps the forms of affiliation that emerge from the large scale of migrations in recent decades will serve new ways of becoming Persian. The fluidities that appear to threaten the Persian language and Iranian identity today have always been present in Iranian cultural history. The hen’s husband 125 In the next chapter, I turn to two contemporary literary manifestations in Per- sian that invite us to rethink the desire to contain and control the means and modes of becoming Iranian.

Notes 1 A particularly apt example is Ehsan Yarshater’s “The Persian Phase of Islamic Civiliza- tion,” which argues against the scholarly conflation of the decline of Islamic civilization and the waning of Arab hegemony. Instead he contends: “As the Arab component of the Islamic civilization began to decline, a dramatic event of enormous significance started to take shape among the daring Saffarids and the cultured Samanids in eastern and northeastern Persia. By the tenth century a new Islamic culture, grounded in Persian language and anchored in Iranian traditions, began to blossom in Khorasan, Sistan, and Transoxiana. Soon it spread in all directions” (60–61). 2 George Lang argues for a less polarized view of the translation paradigms: “Transla- tors have always had to decide whether to sublimate or to accentuate the otherness of SL [source language], however beholden they may have been to the principal criterion applied to translations, felicitas. Alterity and fidelity are in fact not antonyms; instead, they represent two reconcilable hermeneutic principles themselves enmeshed in other criteria” (239). 3 In his Translating the Garden, Ghanoonparvar writes: “[. . .] I must confess that occasionally there have been Persian texts I have had to translate into English in order to comprehend them” (6). In this instance, Ghanoonparvar addresses his experience of Persian texts which are inaccessible because of particular uses of language. In my case, the comprehension moved beyond the apparent meaning of plot, characters, and action of the novel and encompassed Modarressi’s broader relationship to language and communication. 4 The story is about a return journey an Iranian makes from Europe to his native Iran. Upon his arrival, he is thrown into jail along with two compatriots. They are joined by a local man whose attempt to communicate with his cellmates leaves him frustrated. One of the cellmates speaks a Persian interspersed with French words, while another cell- mate speaks a Persian heavily inflected with Arabic, making it impossible for the local to understand them. In contrast, the narrator addresses the confused man in Persian, providing him with solace and a sense of shared linguistic and national community.

Works cited Dabashi, Hamid. The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan, Theory and History of Literature 30. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Esfandiary, F. M. Identity Card . 1966. E-reads Publications, 1999. Ghanoonparvar, M. R. Translating the Garden. Austin: U of Texas P, 2001. Jamalzadeh, Mohammad Ali. “Persian Is Sugar.” In Once upon a Time. Trans. Heshmat Moayyad and Paul Sprachman. New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1985: 31–43. Lang, George. “La Belle Altérité: Towards a Dialogical Paradigm in Translation Theory.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature , March/June (1992): 237–251. Meskoob, Shahrokh. Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language . Washington DC: Mage, 1992. Modarressi, Taghi. Azraye khalvat neshin. Bethesda, Md.: IBEX, 2010. ———. The Book of Absent People . New York: Doubleday, 1986. 126 The hen’s husband ———. The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette . New York: Doubleday, 1989. ———. “Salman Rushdie and the Immigrant’s Dilemma.” Washington Post, 12 March 1989, x7. ———. The Virgin of Solitude. Trans. Nasrin Rahimieh. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univer- sity P, 2008. ———. “Writing with an Accent.” Chanteh (1992): 7–9. Moghadam, Hasan. Ja ‘ far khan az farang amadeh . Ed. Hasan Javadi. Middle Eastern Series 6. Piedmont, Cal.: Jahan, 1984. Montesquieu. Persian Letters . Trans. C. J. Betts. New York: Penguin, 1973. Mortazavi, Houman. Project Misplaced: The Rise and Fall of Simon Ordoubadi . Los Angeles: Printup Graphics, 2004. Robinson, Douglas. Translation and Taboo. DeKalb: Northern Illinois U P, 1996. Steinbach, Alice. “The Secret Life of Babies.” Baltimore Sun , 10 November 1996, 4J. Yarshater, Ehsan. “The Persian Phase of Islamic Civilization.” In Reza Ali Khazeni Memo- rial Lectures in Iranian Studies. Vol. 1, The Gift of Persian Culture: Its Continuity and Influence in History. Ed. Peter J. Chelkowski. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2011: 57–70. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 6 Illuminating internal alterities

In Modarressi’s The Virgin of Solitude, the relegation of Madame’s alterity to the Armenian Christians of Iran highlights the dichotomies that the re-creation of Iran as a nation under Islam brought forth. The insistence on impenetrable boundaries between what is imagined as the “true” Iranian and others, be they transplants like Madame or Armenian Iranians, is inseparable from the desire for a pure essence of Iranianness. At different moments in modern Iranian history, the illusory dream of attaining and containing that essence has created different forms of exclusion. If before the 1979 revolution a model Iranian was to be secular and Westernized, after the revolution the model Iranian became a devout Muslim resisting Western influence.1 The contestations over who is entitled to “Iranianness” have a much less visible, but no less significant, impact on the minorities that have long inhabited the Iranian plateau. Ethnic and religious minorities such as Arabs, Assyrians, Azeris, Armenians, Baha’is, Kurds, Sunnis, and Zoroastrians, among others, have long been part of the Iranian cultural fabric. Yet, the debates about the proper con- stituents of Iranianness have far too frequently cast them to the margins. In this chapter I examine the literary works of an Armenian Iranian writer, Zoya Pirzad, as manifestations of both Iranian culture and what it disavows. As a celebrated and internationally recognized award-winning author, Pirzad writes in Persian, has enjoyed popularity among readers, and is one of Iran’s best contemporary authors. In this sense, she could hardly be called marginal or marginalized. But her writing complicates the conceptualization of Iranianness as anchored in linguistic, ethnic, and religious singularity and uniformity and challenges the assumption that Armenians and, by extension, other religious minorities had equal

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 access and entitlement to the construct of a modern, secular, and cosmopolitan Iran prior to the 1979 revolution. My analysis will focus on Pirzad’s 2002 novel Cheragha ra man khamush mikonam [I Will Turn Off the Lights], hailed as the second novel written in Persian by an Armenian Iranian,2 and her 2006 novel, Yek ruz mandeh beh eid-e pak [A Day before Easter] for their representation of the Armenian characters within a majority Persian-speaking Muslim Iran before and after the 1979 revolution. In my reading of Pirzad I also chart a questioning of my own inherited cultural history her works initiated. I grew up in the late 50s and early 60s in the small Caspian town of Pahlavi (after the revolution, the town reverted to its original name, Anzali). The first 128 Illuminating internal alterities school I attended was Armenian. While Armenian Iranians were entitled to run their own schools, they had to follow the state-mandated curriculum in Persian with the exception of instruction in religion. The focus on nationalization of schools and their curricula adversely affected the knowledge of Armenian language and history:

Since the mid-19th century, Armenians had schools of their own where Armenian was the only language of instruction, with Persian and French taught as foreign languages. These schools were closed down in 1936 by the order of Reza Shah during his vigorous campaign for the Persianization of all educational establishment in Iran. They were allowed to reopen in 1943, but government directives prohibited the use of Armenian as the language of instruction except in religion, for which eight to ten hours per week were provided. The Armenian language suffered as a result; it was still the major, and often the only, language of oral communication in the community, but awareness of Armenia history and culture, as well as the number of qualified teachers in these subjects, generally declined. (Amurian and Kasheff)

So it was that I received my first lessons in my native tongue from Armenian Iranian teachers, who were conscripted into endorsing and enforcing Persian and the national Iranian identity of the pre-revolutionary era. That is not to say that they felt alienated from the project of nation building. In fact, as Eliz Sanasarian reveals, before the revolution, it was possible for the religious minorities to lay claim to forms of affiliation and belonging: “Before 1979, everyone was an ‘Irani’ albeit in pretense; after the revolution, Irani was replaced by aqaliat , Bahai, and Sunni. ‘Hamvatan [fellow countryman/woman]’ was replaced by ‘Muslim sisters and brother’ ” (154). The pretense of a universal sense of national belonging had a strong influence on my own formation. My childhood memories were rose- colored images of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish children mingling together in the Armenian school, apparently free from constraints of ethnicity and religion. I have clung to the image of all of us children being equal citizens of modern Iran. But my cultivated personal memories of the easy coexistence of Armenians with Muslim Iranians cover over a history of “[f]orced conversions to Islam, discrimi- natory measures, high taxation, and instances of clerical agitation” (Sanasarian

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 38). This encounter with my past, the history of my Armenian compatriots, and Persian literary expression turned up what Étienne Balibar describes in his essay “Ambiguous Universality”:

From a theoretical point of view [. . .] things could be summarized as follows: real universality is a stage in history where, for the first time, “humankind” as a single web of interrelationships is no longer an ideal or utopian notion but an actual condition for every individual; nevertheless, far from representing a situation of mutual recognition, it actually coincides with a generalized pattern of conflicts, hierarchies and exclusions. It is not even a situation in which Illuminating internal alterities 129 individuals communicate at least virtually with each other, but much more one where global communication networks provide every individual with a distorted image or a stereotype of all the others, either as “kin” or as “aliens”, thus raising gigantic obstacles to any dialogue. “Identities” are less isolated and more incompatible, less univocal and more antagonistic. (154–55)

By charting the incompatibilities I discovered at the core of Iran’s modern cultural history and national literature I hope to bring into focus some of the problematic aspects of Iran’s national self-representation, to say nothing of self- glorification, as a cosmopolitan nation open to ethnic and religious diversity and coexistence before the 1979 revolution. The English title of Pirzad’s first novel, Things We Left Unsaid, chosen by the publisher against the advice and wishes of the translator,3 is in many ways an apt choice. The novel is focalized through a first-person narrator, Clarice, whose life is circumscribed by her role as housewife and mother. Her daily chores around the house consist of caring for her teenage son, twin daughters, and husband, who spends most of his free time meeting with like-minded left-leaning friends. Clarice’s daily routines are punctuated with a brief exchange with her husband, Artoush, who before heading off to bed, asks, “Will you get the lights, or shall I?” (19). The question to which Clarice usually responds by offering to turn off the lights epitomizes the transformation they have undergone over the course of their marriage and how reduced their communication has become. In a passage early in the novel (second chapter), we see through Clarice’s eyes, as if for the first time, the banality and predictability of their life together:

I drew my hand out of the apron pocket and set the book back on the shelf. I was tired and did not feel like reading. Artoush tossed the newspaper on the coffee table and stood up. He stretched and yawned. “Will you get the lights, or shall I?” The newspaper slid onto the floor. I looked at him. He had gained twenty kilos over the past seventeen years and his formerly thick hair was now limp and thinning. Everyone called him Doc, because of his standing as an engineer, but because of his goatee, which was no longer so black, Alice called him Professor behind his back. He has changed so much, I thought. I must have changed too.

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The minimalism of the communication between Clarice and Artoush is haunted by memories that occasionally surface in the narrative and, like a dream Clarice remembers vividly, break the apparent calm that reigns over their lives. The content of the dream highlights Clarice’s anxieties about not finding her way out of who she has become: “I was in a huge house, with a maze of rooms and corridors. There were many people coming and going, none of whom I knew. I took the twins by the hand and tried to leave the house, but could find no way out” (243). The repetitions of the daily chores and interactions between the 130 Illuminating internal alterities family members mask the potential for disruption and instability at the level of family and the nation. Pirzad’s novel is set in the southern city of Abadan, a port city where the Anglo- Persian Oil Company built its refinery. The narrative takes place in the 1960s, long after the nationalization of oil, when Abadan was a cosmopolitan city. Inter- estingly, the novel focuses on Armenian characters, but it cannot be reduced to a representation of Armenians as an Iranian minority. In fact, resisting the stereotypes of Armenians that have circulated in Persian language and letters,4 the novel explodes the concept of the Armenian as different into a multitude of differences. The surface ordinariness of the lives depicted, as echoed in the title of the English translation, conceals what is left unsaid and unexplored about the leveling of differences of language, ethnicity, and religion into a category of the non-Persian Other. This foil to the presumed pure Iranian has been a crucial mechanism of bolstering the myth of an uninterrupted Iranian culture across time and place. In Things We Left Unsaid, we are introduced to the multiple layers of difference from the very outset. Clarice’s daily chores are thrown into sharp relief by the arrival of a widower, Emile, his daughter, Emily, and mother, Elmira Simonian, into a neighboring house in the Iranian Oil Company residential quarters. The house the Simonians move into, a replica of the one inhabited by Clarice and her family, does not look like a place about to be transformed into a home: “On one side of the room were the easy chairs with metal armrests, and across from that, the dining room table with its six chairs. This was the furniture provided by the Oil Company to all houses in Bawarda. Most families preferred, like ours, to buy a somewhat better dining room set, sofa, and easy chairs. The windows had no drapes and there were a few wires sticking out of the empty slots for the wall fixtures” (44). Against this backdrop of transitoriness, there are pieces of furniture and decorative objects that do not match the rest of the original furnishings and hearken to a more lavish earlier life. The disjuncture between the family’s present surroundings and Elmira’s past becomes even more intriguing in light of what Clarice’s mother reveals about Elmira:

“What a wedding her poor father threw for his daughter! An orchestra from Tehran, a chef from France. He bought the oldest wines from the cellar of Levon the wine-merchant. He invited a crowd of grandees, from courtiers to foreign ambassadors.” I turned the potatoes over and thought, after the luxu-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 rious life Mother had described her leading, this house in north Bawarda must seem quite contemptible. I remembered the dim empty rooms of the house: the quite expensive and once beautiful tablecloth and cloth napkins; the tar- nished, almost black, silverware; and the chipped china. Only the twin can- delabras retained their long-ago luster and brilliance, along with that wooden cabinet. (112)

As if reflecting her surroundings, Elmira is much diminished in her physical and social stature. Nevertheless for Clarice she becomes an object of fascination. Illuminating internal alterities 131 Against her own nondescript life of wife and mother, she is mesmerized by Elmi- ra’s life of glamour, illicit love, and travel across the globe. As Elmira tells her about her clandestine affair with her lover, Clarice looks at photographs taken in India, England, and France, places where Elmira and her husband lived, and places where her lover followed them. For Clarice, Elmira becomes a representative of all that is alien and exotic to her. Clarice’s curiosity about the hidden details of Elmira’s past life is not unlike the fascination, to say nothing of the longing admiration, Mrs. Nurollahi, her husband’s secretary, has with Clarice as the embodiment of the Armenian women she imagines to be more progressive. Mrs. Nurollahi is Muslim and committed to fighting for women’s suffrage. This is what she tells Clarice when they meet in a café: “You Armenian ladies [. . .] are far ahead of us. Muslim women have only now started to fight for some of the things you have had for some time. We are just setting out on the path” (215–16). Ironically Clarice is completely unaware of the politics of women’s rights, and her own life does not reflect the values Mrs. Nurollahi believes to be uniformly shared by all Armenian women. When in an earlier encounter, Mrs. Nurollahi invites Clarice to attend the meeting of their society and speaks about the impending parliamentary elections, Clarice is ashamed of her own ignorance: “I did not know that the majles elections were coming up, and had only heard here and there about the issue of women’s voting rights. I reproached myself: you, and most other Armenian women, act like you are not living in this country!” (117). In her embarrassment, interestingly, Cla- rice is equally quick to jump to generalizations about herself as a representative of Armenian women. The patterns of mutual othering prevent the two women from being able to recognize attempts to break out of the straitjacket of Muslim/ Armenian divide. For example, when Mrs. Nurollahi asks Clarice about the commemoration ceremonies for the victims of the Armenian genocide, Clarice won- ders: “Mrs. Nurollahi, who was not Armenian, knew about the genocide that began on 24 April 1915, and although I was born in this country . . . [a]gain I felt embarrassed. She had said, ‘We must learn from our Armenian friends.’ Surely she said this merely to be polite” (118). In the original the text reads: “We must learn a lot from Armenian ladies” (110), setting up more distance between the Muslim and Armenian women. That distance is also echoed in Clarice’s justi- fication about why she should not expect Mrs. Nurollahi to be present during the commemoration: “I looked through the crowd trying to find Mrs. Nurollahi.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 I did not, and so returned to the auditorium. Maybe Alice was mistaken. Why should Mrs. Nurollahi come? She did not speak Armenian, and the ceremonies for the 24th April were not particularly interesting” (143). But to her surprise, when she questions Mrs. Nurollahi later, she learns that she was indeed present and that her reasons for attending transcend the narrower terms of affiliation: “ ‘Why wouldn’t I? A tragedy is a tragedy, it’s not a Muslim or Armenian thing’ ” (221). This last response notwithstanding, Mrs. Nurollahi is equally caught up in the ambivalences and contradictions of national identity. The massacre of the Armenians had everything to do with being Muslim or Armenian. It was not a tragedy committed on Iranian soil, which makes it possible for the differences 132 Illuminating internal alterities to be minimized. But they remain deeply entrenched in the very idea of being Iranian or Armenian. Clarice’s reflections on her own lack of interest in Iran as opposed to Armenia highlight how the terms of inclusion and exclusion have been internalized: “I looked at the map of Iran on the wall above his bed. My eyes circled around a lake and I leaned in closer to read its name. Bakhtegan. I remembered my appoint- ment with Mrs. Nurollahi and wondered why it was that I knew the names of all the cities on the map of Armenia without ever having seen them, and yet did not know the names of the lakes of Iran?” (156). The implicit question within the question that Clarice asks herself is: How have Iranian and Armenian identities been configured that they have become mutually exclusive? It is interesting that the only character in the novel who has no hesitation about identifying himself as an Iranian is Clarice’s husband, Artoush. Artoush does not merely affiliate with other Armenians. His acquaintances are “three middle-aged men who sometimes came to our place. They were not Arme- nian” (93) and what brings them together is a common concern with Iran’s political future. Against the advice of his wife and Armenian friends, Artoush involves himself in “politics” and takes part in discussions about charting a different future for Iran. In contrast, he ignores the concerns of the Armenian community and does not attend the commemoration ceremony. He tells Clarice: “ ‘Tragedies happen every day. Not just fifty years ago, but right now. Not far away, but right here! A stone’s throw from the heart of green, safe, chic, and modern Abadan’ ” (148). As he reveals in a heated exchange with a friend, Garnik, he does not see his Armenian identity as excluding his identification with Iran and Iranians: “We are Iranians, are we not?” to which Garnik responds: “We are Armenians, are we not?” (80). What is left out of this exchange, although implicit in the challenge Artoush issues is the possibility of being at once Armenian and Iranian. The kind of affiliation and solidarity imagined by Artoush and his activist friends suggests, argues Rasmus Christian Elling in his study of Iranian minorities, “one can espouse different identities at different times – without that necessarily resulting in National disunity, territorial disintegration or an existential threat to Iranian- ness” (205). As if to underscore the multiplicity inherent in any one of the two labels of national affiliation, we encounter an Armenian woman, a survivor of the genocide, Khatoun Yeremian, from Van (a city in Turkey), who delivers a moving speech at the commemoration event: “She spoke in a different dialect from ours,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 in the western Armenian city of Van, saying things like ‘a wee bit’ instead of ‘a little bit;’ and ‘gusto’ in place of ‘joy’ ” (144). The patterns of displacement deeply etched in the lives of the victims of the Armenian genocide and laid bare in the Armenian that Khatoun Yeremian speaks, is also evident in the loss of a territorial belonging. The narrator tells us that she now lives in Tehran, recalling other displacements that resulted from the destruction of Julfa and the forced migration of its residents to New Julfa in Iran. The making of modern Iran and Iranian culture, we are reminded, cannot be imagined without these multiple and forced crisscrossings of religions, ethnicities, and languages. Illuminating internal alterities 133 Apart from the Armenians who are the central characters of Pirzad’s novel, there is another “minority” of Arab Iranians who live on the very edges of modern Abadan under much less affluent conditions: “I had been in Abadan for many years, but [was] always shocked by the contrast between the Oil Company’s section of town and the rest of the city. It was like stepping from a waterless desert wasteland into a lush garden” (251). The Arabs are the underprivileged whose otherness is brought out in the novel’s treatment of the attack of the locusts. The city is swarmed by locusts and Clarice finds their front yard, lawn, and vegetation covered with them. While Clarice, her family, and the other residents of the Oil Company housing are reeling from the sudden devastation wrought by the locusts, to the Arabs who, not unlike the locusts, swarm the compound the locusts are a boon. Clarice finds an Arab woman on her doorstep asking to buy the locusts, which they consider a delicacy:

Youma figured out the problem before anyone else. She turned around and said something in Arabic to the boys, who all cracked up laughing. Then she explained that they had come to buy the locusts, that the Arabs in Khuzestan roast them and eat them. “S’like sunflower seeds, ya know, Mrs. Doc? Like roasted seeds. Like so.” She held her thumb and hennaed forefinger in front of her mouth, pantomiming the cracking open of a sunflower seed in the front teeth. (273)

Clarice’s surprise and the disgust her children express invoke a Persian expression, arab-e malakh khor, “the locust-eating Arabs,” used as a derogatory epithet that encapsulates many Iranians’ disdain for Arabs. The stereotype is deployed most often in conjunction with the memory of the loss of a refined Persian civilization to Arabs, depicted as desert nomads bereft of culture. The discourse of modern Iranian nationalism has embraced this representation of Arab civilization and has endorsed it as a means of buttressing closer identification with the national pride. The Arab Iranian, rendered inferior and abject, has thus been denied inclusion in a nation imagined racially, culturally, and linguistically pure.5 In Pirzad’s novel, Emile reminds us of biblical allusions: “In the Old Testa- ment, the Jewish prophet Joel warns the people to repent their sins if they wish to be spared from the plague of locusts” (268). If there is any symbolic meaning to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 be attached to the swarm of the locusts it could perhaps be located in the deepen- ing affection Clarice feels for Emile. But the symbolic significance is overshadowed by the more immediate and visceral connection made between the Arabs swarming over the locust carcasses and competing with each other to collect the most. Mirroring the way in which the locusts have stripped the trees and the lawns of any semblance of life, the Arabs swoop down on the neighborhood and remove the locusts. Making concrete the age-old association between Arabs and locusts in Persian, The Things We Left Unsaid cuts into the fantasy of a harmonious national culture in which discourses of diversity trump those of minority. 134 Illuminating internal alterities In A Day before Easter, translated into English by Amy Motlagh as The Space between Us , there is an even greater emphasis on the representation of relationships across the Muslim and Armenian divide. The novel consists of three sections entitled: “Sour Cherry Stones,” “Seashells,” and “White Violets.” They chart the life history of an Armenian man, Edmond, from childhood on the shores of the Caspian Sea to adulthood and middle age in Tehran. The novel evoked particularly deep memories in me. The first part is set in a small town on the Caspian Sea, and a good part of the narrative takes place in an Armenian school whose physical description, the small chapel in the yard and a cemetery it backed onto, made it appear a replica of the school I attended in my hometown. I was overwhelmed by curiosity and at last contacted Zoya Pirzad to tell her how much the story reminded me of the Armenian school I had attended as a child. She replied that the setting she had chosen for the story was indeed the same school she had attended for a year. While our time at the school overlapped, albeit in different grades, neither of us had retained a memory of the other. Coin- cidentally I mentioned my discovery to an Armenian friend from the same school and her mother, who used to be one of our teachers. Unlike us, she remembered Zoya Pirzad and found an old family photo in which Pirzad also appeared. Her daughter and I were skeptical, but stepping into the role of the teacher and guide, she suggested that I email her a scan of the photograph. I received a confirmation from Pirzad, although she could not remember anyone else in that picture. She was curious about a doll that appeared in the photograph. She remembered having loved and coveted that doll and wanted to know if anyone knew where it was now. I asked, knowing already that my queries would not turn up an answer. But Pirzad’s recollection of the doll was an important reminder for me about how each of us had clung to different bits of memory of a moment we shared in the same space and time. Like Pirzad, I don’t remember many of the names from our school days but I had remembered it as a time when we were unconstrained by linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences. My self-indulgent nostalgia did not survive the second reading of A Day before Easter. The novel puts the lie to the nationalist propaganda of my generation and demanded a reckoning with my inherited cultural archives. The novel highlights some of the most difficult questions at the heart of Iran’s diverse religious landscape, particularly love and marriage between Muslim and Armenian Christian Iranians. It pinpoints taboos and depicts fictional characters’

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 struggle to uphold dominant social and cultural values and occasional attempts at transgression. But those who fail to conform become outcasts, flee across borders, or live lives of isolation. In other words, the novel is charged both with a desire to break free of norms and the recognition of the heavy price that must be paid for transgressing social norms. The tensions represented in the novel do not merely reflect Iran’s contemporary cultural scene. Without providing specific historical signposts to help us date the various episodes, the stories give us a sense of time that reaches well before the revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. I emphasize this historical dimension to underline how far-reaching and embedded are the Illuminating internal alterities 135 taboos represented and problematized in the stories. The contradictory impulse to be at once conformist and transgressive makes the stories deeply connected to one another across an expanse of time. Against this backdrop it is not possible to read the interfaith anxieties as only symptomatic of post-revolutionary Iranian social life. In the first part, the first-person narrative takes us into Edmond’s childhood. The opening line reads: “My childhood home was right next door to both the church and the school” (1). No sooner does this opening sentence situate us vis- à-vis a place of growing up and learning than we are introduced to reminders of the end of life:

Behind the church there was a graveyard. There was no wall between the graveyard and the courtyard, maybe because there was no need for it. The principal had forbidden the students from going into the graveyard and the word of the principal was, for us, the highest and most daunting of all walls. (4)

Despite the principal’s injunctions Edmond finds himself drawn to the cemetery. He and his friend, Tahereh, play in the cemetery, but he is also fearful of the place and shies away from being there alone. If the physical presence of the cemetery haunts Edmond’s childhood, so does a sense of decay he attempts to counteract, at least in his imagination. As a preschool child, Edmond adopts the habit of pulling a chair over to a window seat where he would sit and watch the church and schoolyard. His attention is typically drawn to the flower pattern carved intermit- tently in the school’s white exterior stone wall: “I could never follow the games the children played during recess: my eyes were fixed on the five-petaled flowers. I thought that when I went to school, I wouldn’t run around excitedly during recess, but rather, handkerchief in hand, I’d clean out the moss that gathered between the petals” (3). The compulsion to preserve the exterior façade of the school, like the child’s desire to fight against other signs of decay, be they in structures or human relations, resonate throughout the novel. Edmond finds a willing helpmate and something of a soul mate in a childhood friend. His childhood is marked by his close friendship with Tahereh, a Muslim schoolmate who is the daughter of the Armenian school’s janitor. Tahereh and her family live on the first floor of the school building. Because Tahereh’s parents

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 look after the school, the school board is persuaded by Edmond’s father to enroll Tahereh. Edmond’s father nevertheless does not approve of his son spending time with Tahereh. He never failed to make Edmond “listen to a long and repetitive lecture about class and religion and the differences between peoples” (4) when he realized his son had disobeyed him. As a child, Edmond is made aware of the importance of upholding these differences, as he is schooled in Armenian identity: “In my room I closed my Persian notebook and thought about the composition I was supposed to write in Armenian. The prompt was, What are our responsibilities to our homeland?” (17), despite the fact that “like the other Armenians in our small coastal town, I had only seen Armenia on the map” (17). Interestingly 136 Illuminating internal alterities while Edmond and his Armenian peers are being imbued with a sense of belonging rooted in their ethnic and religious identity, Tahereh, who was born into a Muslim family, shuttles between the two worlds interestingly mapped onto the very school. In fact, Tahereh proves to be a remarkable student capable of enacting an Arme- nian identity. In many respects, Tahereh outperforms her Armenian classmates even in their own language. Here is Edmond thinking about the above-mentioned composition:

I wished Tahereh were here to help me. Tahereh’s Armenian composition, like the rest of her subjects, was better than anyone else’s, including mine. There wasn’t a child in the school that hadn’t been compared unfavorably to Tahereh at some point: “Aren’t you ashamed? The daughter of the Muslim janitor speaks your mother tongue better than you do.” (20)

Tahereh is not only adept at learning Armenian; she attends church with her schoolmates and is equally devoted to learning the prayers: “She came with us to church on Sundays, and just like Grandmother, closed her eyes firmly, knelt to pray, and crossed herself. She knew all the prayers and hymns by heart” (29). If Tahereh passes as an Armenian, do her Armenian schoolmates pass for Ira- nians? With the exception of the lessons they receive in Armenian, they learn from the same primers as Tahereh and are shaped into Iranian national subjects, albeit with more limited rights of representation. Under the Iranian Constitution, Armenian Iranians had the right to elect two representatives, one from the north and one from the south, to the Majles (the National Assembly). As Eliz Sanasarian reminds us, “In the Shah’s authoritarian system, minority deputies to the Majlis (similar to the Muslim deputies) were mere figureheads, some with close business ties to the royal family and their friends” (39). This tokenism and other forms of marginalization of the Armenians betray a refusal to acknowledge “the significant role that the Armenian revolutionary intellectuals and fighters played in [the] overthrow of the anti-Constitutionalist Mohammed-‘Ali Shah and in the restora- tion of the constitutional government in 1908 to 1909” (Chaqueri xv). These episodes make up part of the repressed history my generation did not learn in school. The collective national amnesia also barred us from knowing that on 29 October

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 1910 the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) was informed that with the help of Armenian Iranians “the first group of the Socialist-Democratic Party of Persia ha[d] been organized” in my hometown of Anzali (Chaqueri 88). I have learned in my recent reexamination of personal and political history that my Armenian teacher and her daughter continued to uphold the ideals of social democratic movements. They supported leftist movements before and after the 1979 revolution. Like Pirzad’s character, Tahereh, their national and political affiliations could be multiple. Within Pirzad’s story, however, Tahereh’s embrace of Armenian language, religion, and culture does not stop her from saying her prayers at home. When, for Illuminating internal alterities 137 example, Edmond asks her how she performs her Muslim prayers while wearing a cross she has grown accustomed to having around her neck, she responds matter- of-factly that she replaces the cross with an Allah necklace during her Muslim prayers. What Edmond learns from his Muslim friend, Tahereh, is the constructed nature of an Iranian school child’s identity along vectors of ethnicity, language, and religion. She represents the possibility of thinking outside the normative positions of minority and majority. The behaviors and practices she has learned as a child growing up Muslim in an Armenian school do not limit her to choosing one or another set of beliefs. She learns to cross back and forth between embodying Muslim and Armenian identities. The apparent ease with which Tahereh negotiates a path between her Mus- lim family and the Armenian community in which she has been raised is not replicated on a broader social plane, nor is it shared by the other children. In fact, the type of crossing and self-translation in which Tahereh engages is far from condoned. As the story reveals, a forbidden relationship of a different kind has developed between the unmarried Armenian principal of the school and Tahereh’s mother. The discovery of this relationship reveals a deep anxiety on the part of the Armenians and Muslims about crossing the religious and ethnic divide. During the scene in which Tahereh’s father threatens to kill his wife and the school principal, Edmond hears his mother shout: “This is all that woman’s fault” (53). After she is left alone with the principal, she says to him: “You should not concern yourself. It is not your doing” (54). What makes Edmond’s mother’s position particularly ironic is that she herself is constantly criticized by Edmond’s father and grandmother for not fulfilling the role of an obedient and model wife. She moves out of the bedroom she shares with her husband and for the remainder of her marriage, even after the family moves to Tehran, she maintains a room of her own. The three parts of the novel are connected through the specter of a relationship or marriage between an Armenian and a Muslim. In the second and third parts, Edmond’s own daughter falls in love with a Muslim man at the university and finds her family members resistant to accepting their relationship. In the first encounter between Behzad, the young man with whom Edmond’s daughter, Ale- nush, has fallen in love, we see how language betrays the internalization of the other:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Martha said, “Would you like some more ghormeh sabzi? Of course, it is not as tasty as the Persians’ ghormeh sabzi .” Behzad said, “Persians? I am not Persian. I’m a Turk – my father and mother are from Tabriz.” This made Alenush laugh even harder. “Armenians call all Iranians ‘Per- sians,’ no matter which part of Iran they’re from.” (81)

Behzad’s attempt to make his own difference a point of contact between himself and Alenush’s family runs up against the totalizing mechanisms that prevent 138 Illuminating internal alterities differentiations between and among Armenians and non-Armenian Iranians who themselves represent different ethnicities and languages, to say nothing of other religions. But these multiple differences fade away and lose their purchase over against group identification and conformist behavior. Those who fail to fit into these expected patterns become outcasts. In the third and final story, Edmond learns that the single Armenian woman, Danique, who works alongside him as the vice principal of the school he runs had to leave her hometown and family because of her love for a Muslim man. Danique’s life story remains largely shrouded in mystery. She does not mention her past, and Edmond’s wife does not permit herself to reveal what she has been told in confidence. But Edmond learns enough to realize why she moved from Tabriz to Tehran and never married. Even long after it would have mattered, she makes excuses for not going to church. At the Easter dinner she tells Edmond: “I am sorry. I didn’t have time to go get the holy wafer. I know not having time is just an excuse for not going to the church to get it” (129). Danique’s pretenses, like the need to preserve the façade of the moss-ridden school, is an impulse and a learned habit. It is a social necessity that has become a part of Danique’s character even though she has refused to adhere to the dictates of tradition. Her isolation and exile stand as counter-examples to Tahereh’s mobility, and Alenush and Behzad’s to some extent. The young couple decides to leave Iran, but long after their departure Edmond and his wife, Marta, are faced with questions about their daughter’s marriage to a Muslim man. Ironically the lessons of diversity the young children learn in the school are undermined at the level of social mores. The impossible marriage of Muslims and Armenians depicted in The Space between Us and the difficulty of trespassing between the domains of difference foreclose the possibility of troubling the traditional and the normative. The possibility of translating and transporting oneself from an Armenian realm of experience into a Muslim one or vice versa proves illusory, like the rare stone Tahereh challenges Edmond to find. One day when the two children are at the seashore competing to see which of them can collect the most sea shells, Tahereh tires of the game and suggests that instead they search for something unusual. When Edmond asks what that would be, she responds: “Like a black stone with a blue streak” (95). Edmond searches in vain and for some time for such a stone, but one day Tahereh gives him a stone that fits the description. But here is what Edmond

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 discovers: “A few days later when I was playing with my stones and seashells, I ran my hand over the stone and the blue streak came off. When I said to Tahereh, ‘You cheated, that’s not fair,’ she widened her eyes and started to giggle” (95). What is child’s play for Edmond and Tahereh becomes a painful lesson for the adults. As represented in Edmond’s own life, the impossibility of bridging the divides of language, religion, and ethnicity will continue to imbue his life with a heavy foreboding of loss, decay, and loneliness. In fact, the complex dynamics of acceptance and disavowal of a difference deeply ingrained in the position of a minority within a minority is beautifully illustrated in a passage in the third story. Illuminating internal alterities 139 The passage in question is a flashback to the protagonist Edmond’s childhood. On the surface it is a memory of the perennial disagreements between Edmond’s parents and the blame Edmond’s mother receives for failing to conform to the normative standards of behavior. The episode recalls when his mother first bought him green ink, which he was to use throughout his life. To his father’s objection about the choice of green ink, Edmond’s mother points out that she bought it because it is different from black or blue ink. The father mocks his wife for wanting to do things differently from others. In the midst of this exchange, Edmond’s mother invites Edmond to test the ink. When Edmond’s mother urges him to write something to see if he likes the color of the ink, Edmond writes in the corner of the Armenian Iranian newspaper Alik : “Green ink is different from all other inks. I like people and things that are different” (106). The appeal of the tantalizing and the transgressive undergirds all three narratives, but difference becomes a source of anxiety and fear both for the Armenian and for the Muslim characters. The desire to stand out is, in other words, undercut by the fear of isolation and marginalization. That Edmond happens to write this line on the corner of a page of Alik , the Armenian daily newspaper first published in 1931, can be read as an attempt to register the will to stand in nonconformity on the most symbolic level of Armenian Iranian identity. If the newspaper is a reminder of the concerted effort to maintain and uphold a form of identity sanctioned by the community, Edmond’s message is a child’s means of supporting his mother’s bold, albeit frustrated, gestures of defiance. Zoya Pirzad’s fictional works initiated a reexamination of my own nostalgic and glorified narratives of a time before the 1979 revolution when differences in religion and language did not acts as barriers to laying claim to equal membership in the nation. This return to what I remembered of my childhood in the Armenian school underscored for me the subjective and selective nature of memory. The narrator’s description of the physical properties of the school building revived precise memories of the school entrance and a sharp pungent smell, neither pleasant nor repulsive, I associated with the school. When four decades later I revisited the building, no longer serving as a school, I was amazed to experience it as a Proustian opening to a rush of memories. But I had no memory of the cemetery behind the school. To my utter surprise, my sister, who also attended that school, remembers the cemetery, but in my memory there is nothing but a wall surrounding the schoolyard. In “Sour Cherry Stones” I came across detailed descriptions

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 of the cemetery, but no effort could conjure up even faded memories of it. Would the memory of a separate cemetery for the Armenians of our town serve as a reminder of insurmountable differences between us, the Muslims, and them, the Armenians? Remembering is itself part of the cultural formation, as reflected in Pirzad’s narrative. One of the characters, Mrs. Grigorian, is the town’s only Armenian who had seen Armenia and, therefore, enjoyed a special status. She is invited to all celebrations and, following dinner, is asked to recount some of her memories of Armenia. Through sheer repetition, Edmond comes to know every single one of her narratives. But she gives her stories particular twists: “The main features of these recollections were the same, but the details changed a little each 140 Illuminating internal alterities time” (18). When Edmond asks his grandmother why Mrs. Grigorian can alter her stories, she tells him: “[. . .] Mrs. Grigorian’s memories are not stories . When you grow up, you’ll understand! And let this be the last time I hear you call your elders liars” (19). The question still persists in Edmond’s mind. The withheld knowledge about what distinguishes “memories” from “stories” is at the very core of identifying with histories, sites, and figures that help shape an Armenian sense of belonging. The gatherings at which Mrs. Grigorian is asked to recall her memories of Armenia are occasions for the community to collectively reconnect with a homeland they have never seen. These instances of formation of a collective identity and its repeated reinscriptions in memory are not unlike the practices of the shaping of the national subjects I associate with my upbringing in the decades before 1979. What was valorized and normalized for my generation of school children were Iran’s diversities, more in abstraction than in reality. Along the way, we lost sight of the embellishments that covered over discriminations and disen- franchisements. In new articulations of Iranianness based solely on Shi’ite Islam, being Armenian Iranian is a category of being indelibly marked as minority. In a powerfully captured passage, Eliz Sanasarian describes her experience of being labeled a minority during a visit to Iran:

As this author sat in a telephone-dispatched taxi in Tehran, the taxi driver turned and looked at her: “You people are much better off than we are!” His voice was coarse. Taken aback, she asked: “Who is ‘you people’? Without hesitation he replied: “Shoma aqaliaten digeh [Aren’t you a minority]?” A whole range of philosophical thoughts raced through her head. The ease and intensity with which he used the label “aqaliat” was new to her in Iran. . . . The ‘aqaliat’ was “the other,” “the marginal,” “the separate from us”: it was an institutionalized “otherness” which was disturbing and different. The taxi driver, unaware of the turmoil and shock he has caused, continued to repeat his question but also to respond to it. “You are a minority. Aren’t you? With that name, of course you are ?” Then, eventually, when she admitted to the classification, the driver sighed with an energetic cheer- iness: ‘I knew it.’ ”6 (154)

The taxi driver’s certainty about his ability to recognize a “minority” and his

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 equally self-assured knowledge of the minorities faring better in the Islamic Republic have disturbing similarities to my own fantasy of my idyllic childhood coexistence with Armenian compatriots. Each in our own fashion, we are lost in what we imagine and project onto the Iranians who are marked by some form of difference. The implied desire for the other notwithstanding, these constructs of Iran’s internal diversities, to return to the beginning of this chapter and recall a passage from Balibar, “far from representing a situation of mutual recognition, [. . .] actually coincide [. . .] with a generalized pattern of conflicts, hierarchies and exclusions.” Recognizing such hierarchies and exclusions in the Iranian cultural imaginary does not offer a remedy to the iterative configurations of Iran as unified Illuminating internal alterities 141 under a particular language, religion, or ethnicity, but as an intervention in the move toward totalizing narratives of Iranianness.

Notes 1 In Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism, Aryanist Racism, and Democratic Struggles, Alireza Asgharzadeh argues that “marginalized writers, poets, and intellectuals in Iran have created their own spaces where they challenge the official discourse by providing a counterdiscourse of their own. Through their narratives, they contribute immensely to the discourse and praxis of decolonization. Simultaneously, they put forward new and innovative ideas in terms of reimagining more humane living conditions for themselves and others. Their creative energies have become effective weapons in the fight against linguicide, cultural genocide, assimilation, and Farstoxifi- cation” (196). 2 In her analysis of the novel, Elham Gheytanchi cites Alice Arezoumanian’s All from One (1963) as the only previous novel penned by an Armenian Iranian writer. She argues that the popularity that Pirzad’s novel has enjoyed among Iranian readers is indicative of Muslim readers’ identification with the novel, particularly with the sense of marginalization experienced by the greater populace under the Islamic Republic. 3 My colleague Franklin Lewis communicated his displeasure with the decision against using the original title on two different occasions. 4 Elham Gheytanchi’s article “I Will Turn Off the Lights: The Allure of Marginality in Postrevolutionary Iran,” provides an excellent overview of the image of Armenians, particularly women, in modern Persian novels. 5 In The Image of Arabs in Modern Persian Literature, Joya Blondel Saad provides a detailed analysis of the othering of the Arab in the work of the major literary choices in modern Iran. 6 Reza Afshari provides this summation of the changes that have affected religious minorities in Iran: “In the Islamic republic of Iran, non-Muslims became religious minorities in a religious state. Moreover, dangerously looming in the society’s alleyways were the politically aroused zealots, always ready to support their religious state in their own unsavory ways. These were hardly spontaneous actions by the ignoramuses. From time to time, especially in the early years of the republic, certain factions competing for power proved their zealotry by attacking religious minorities” (135).

Works cited Afshari, Reza. Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. Amurian, A. and M. Kasheff. “Armenians of Modern Iran.” Encyclopaedia Iranica , 12 Aug. 2011. Web. 10 Aug. 2013. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Asgharzadeh, Alireza. Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism, Ary- anist Racism, and Democratic Struggles . New York: Palgrave, 2007. Chaqueri, Cosroe. Ed. The Armenians of Iran. Center for Middle Eastern Studies Mono- graph Series. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1998. Elling, Rasmus Christian. Minorities in Iran: Nationalism and Ethnicity after Khomeini . New York: Palgrave, 2013. Gheytanchi, Elham. “I Will Turn Off the Lights: The Allure of Marginality in Postrevo- lutionary Iran.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 1.27 (2007): 173–185. Pirzad, Zoya. The Space between Us . Trans. Amy Motlagh. Oxford: Oneworld, 2014. 142 Illuminating internal alterities ———. Things We Left Unsaid . Trans. Franklin Lewis. Oxford: Oneworld, 2012. ———. Cheraghha ra man khamush mikonam [I Will Turn Off the Lights]. Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz, 2002. ———. “Yek ruz mandeh beh eid pak” [A Day before Easter]. In Seh ketab . Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz, 2006. Saad, Joya Blondel. The Image of Arabs in Modern Persian Literature. Lanham, Md.: U P of America, 1996. Sanasarian, Eliz. Religious Minorities in Iran . Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2000. Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Conclusion

“An Iranian today [. . .] differs little from Iranians of yesteryear” (10), states Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, a writer celebrated for his contributions to modern Persian language and literature. I begin my conclusion with this declaration from the essay “Our Iranian Character Traits,” first published in 1965, to recap some of the salient features of the debates about culture in modern Iran. Jamalzadeh is a particularly interesting cultural figure: despite having spent all but his childhood and early youth away from Iran, he remained deeply engaged in debates about how best to reform modern Iranian culture and identity. These debates frequently invoked Iran’s inadequacies vis-à-vis its European counterparts and revolved around some of the same polarities that plague discussions of Iranian culture today. But there are also fascinating attempts at moving beyond the seemingly enduring paradigms, to wit a literary text by the contemporary writer and translator Mostafa Eslamieh that sidelines the very concern about what is befitting Iranian culture. In the movement between Jamalzadeh and Eslamieh we can discern the dynamic patterns that do justice to the multitude of ways in which Iran expresses its cultures. When in 1965 Jamalzadeh made his observations about Iranian character traits, published in the magazine Masa ‘ el-e Iran [Iran’s Problems], he based his analysis on representations of Iranians by both foreigners and Iranians over the course of history. His purported aim was to “shed light on Iran’s social problems and to provide a self-critique that would pave the way for finding solutions” (Kamshad and Mozzaffari). This explains his blending of the descriptive and the didactic and the ease with which he moves between his positions as an insider and outsider. The

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 double perspective is well announced in the preface he wrote when the essay was republished as a book in 1966. Jamalzadeh ends his preface with his name, followed by the place and date: Geneva on the 22nd day of the month of Esfand in 1344 of the Iranian calendar (7). His use of the Iranian calendar is not in and of itself surprising. Most Iranians would not have referred to the Gregorian calendar. What makes the conjunction of the Iranian calendar and a place name well removed from Iran particularly noteworthy is Jamalzadeh’s deliberate self-positioning in a virtual Iran he inhab- its. His identification with Iran is amply marked in his use in the title of the first person plural pronoun, ma , invoking a collectivity that embraces all individuals 144 Conclusion who affiliate themselves with Iran, whether they live in Iran or, like Jamalzadeh, reside outside its borders. A different, and far less precise, use of time pervades his analysis of Iranian culture. For this, we must turn back to the sentence I cited at the beginning and reexamine the contrast between “today” and what I have translated as “yesteryear.” To be precise, Jamalzadeh uses the following temporal markers: “today,” “yesterday,” and “the day before yesterday” (10). These terms are far less open-ended in ordinary usage than in Jamalzadeh’s. We learn in the next paragraph that the period condensed into this time frame reaches as far back as Herodotus and encompasses the impressions of not only natives of Iran but also those of Romans, Chinese, French, and British, among others. Jamalzadeh is not concerned with collapsing vast expanses of history, for his primary aim is to isolate and identify what ails Iran. More specifically, he looks for “[. . .] the fundamental reasons that we Irani- ans, endowed as we are with a rich history, have not been able to advance in step with other younger nations” (10). He goes on to declare that despite the gifts of civilization, Iranians are beset with mental illnesses [amraz-e ravani ]” (12). This pathologization of Iranian character notwithstanding, Jamalzadeh duly acknowledges praiseworthy traits and manners of Iranians such as generosity, hospitality, and sharp wit. Glossing these qualities, however, Jamalzadeh asks: “Is it possible to not even attempt a scientific and diagnostic approach and forgo taking steps toward healing a disease that causes suffering but whose existence is denied?” (12). Jamalzadeh’s words recall Al-e Ahmad’s equally harsh pronouncement that Iran is plagued by its mindless imitation of the West. Jamalzadeh’s concern is rooted in collective traits he culls from disparate sources. They range from Ori- entalist writings to treatises by Iranians. While noting that some representations might well be stereotypical, he concludes that stereotypes have something of the real in them, signaling his assumption of Iran’s inferiority vis-à-vis the West. For Jamalzadeh, as for many of his peers, the path from the critical to the transformative vision was necessarily navigated through an assumption of Iran’s failure to measure up to western Europe. But the path from the belief in Iran’s shortcomings to a generative potential has not always been smooth. On the contrary, it has occasionally resulted in extremes bordering on absurdity. Twentieth and twenty-first century productions of Iranian culture, high and low, reveal the precarious balance between inferiority and pride. The creative possibilities thus unmoored can spin out of control, as we saw in the fanciful fabrications of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Pezeshkzad’s fictional character, Mashallah Khan, and those of the reigning monarch who believed his own performances of modern Iranian culture. The apparent arbitrariness of the changing cultural paradigms is also captured in the song “Q. Q. Bang Bang,” but, unlike Pezeshkzad’s novel, the song reveals the risk of the imaginative and the performative becoming all too real. What begins as staged battles in children’s games quickly transforms into rigid oppositions. The comic note that is lost in the song returns in the film Maxx , as does the confrontation between polarized iterations of Iranianness. The distance that cannot be bridged between Iran and its largest diaspora produces an illegible and untranslatable hybrid, Simon Ordoubadi. Conclusion 145 When the untranslatable is tapped for potential in Modarressi’s novels, impurities of language and culture emerge as other scenes for making connections between what is lost and what can be gained. Here we find the serious and the comic juxtaposed as equally productive for cultural self-expression. In Modar- ressi’s novels, in my translation of his last novel, and in my attempts at translating my mother’s dementia we find distanciations from Persian as the quintessence of Iranian culture. What Persian sounds like to an immigrant writer and a forgetful native speaker need not produce shame but instead could offer a means of con- nectivity precisely when Persian appears to be losing its dominance and grip. Such moments of precariousness serve as a useful reminder that Persian language and Iranian culture have never been static or uniform. The impulse to distill and purify a national culture has only generated counter-definitions rooted in equally limiting and illusory constructs of culture. The attempt to align modern Iran with its pre-Islamic legacy produced an equally exclusionary practice of defining Iran as uniformly Islamic. Despite the apparent Manichaean patterns dominating modern Iranian approaches to culture, we find other scenes of the kind I examined in the last chapter. Persian prose at the hands of Zoya Pirzad, an Armenian Iranian, becomes a means of exploring how one can be a native speaker of Persian and a stranger to the state-sanctioned Iranian identity. Pirzad’s works complicate the clear demar- cations between the Iranian and the Armenian who inhabit the same land, opening up a more ambiguous site for configurations of national belonging and culture. What can be considered “authentic” to Iran thus moves beyond the geographic and linguistic borders that have exercised modern Iranian thought. Moving even further away from the dominant paradigms of Iranian cultural identity might well offer new terrains for exploration. This is the realm of possibilities Mostafa Esla- mieh opens up in his reworking of Kafka’s Metamorphosis . Metamorphosis was first introduced into Persian in 1950. Its translator was none other than Sadeq Hedayat, arguably modern Iran’s most prominent and influential literary figure. Well over three decades later in 1989, Farzaneh Taheri published a new translation of Metamorphosis . Taheri’s translation was followed by Manuchehr Bigdeli Khamseh’s in 2008. Between these two translations, in 2000 Mostafa Eslamieh, a writer and translator, published a novella entitled The Continuation of Metamorphosis or the Return of Gregor Samsa. This work will provide a concluding reflection on conceptualizations of Iranian culture.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Eslamieh begins his narrative with a preface in which Kafka is himself a character: “On November 17, 1912, a cold night, Franz Kafka, an intelligent, sensi- tive, and witty man, thought what would happen if a human being turned into a bug. As it is the persistent manner of writers, he pursued this idea with an obses- sive tenacity, fleshed out his idea, and transcribed the outcome of his imaginings and called it a story” (5).1 The narrator of Eslamieh’s story relates that Kafka then read the story to his friends, Max Brod and Oscar Baum, who enjoyed it and found it humorous. We read about the subsequent publication of the story and the many different types of interpretations to which it gave rise, among them Vladimir N.’s, “the experienced Russian sleuth” who despite his previous successes could not 146 Conclusion “ascertain the hidden mysteries” to explain how a human being could overnight be transformed into a giant bug. Such a finding, the narrator reports, had to await the publication of previously concealed documents. Thus the narrator sets the stage for a new ending to Kafka’s novella:

What became of Gregor is mentioned in Franz Kafka’s report, but to some extent suddenly and hastily. As if Kafka, like the members of the Samsa family, had become bored with what had happened to Gregor and wanted to wrap it up quickly. Or maybe he did not want to make it more complicated. What you are about to read is based on recently found files and documents that detail what should have transpired. (11)

The choice of tenses in the Persian original of the last sentence “mibayad etefaq mioftadeh ast ,” continuous past conditional, is a subtle reminder that the discovery of documents notwithstanding the narration takes place on a virtual plane. Eslamieh’s story follows the structure of Kafka’s novella and consists of three parts. As in the original, the first part ends in Gregor being banished to his room. The second part, however, departs radically from Kafka’s and inserts the character of Shahrzad. Gregor first notices her in his room when he hears sounds not unlike those he makes in his new state. He looks for the source of the sound and finds its owner on a bookcase: “On top of the leather-bound selection of Schiller’s poems, he saw something resembling a bug. Leaning on her extended henna-colored wings, she had crossed her long, lean legs, curled her antenna in like a cane handle, and was singing a song under her breath” (47). She is startled when she notices Gregor and exclaims that she has never before laid eyes on such a large bug. Gregor is equally surprised to hear himself referred to as a bug. The ensu- ing exchange between Gregor and Shahrzad actualizes Gregor’s metamorphosis. When Gregor expresses doubt about being a bug, she retorts: “Well, of course, a bug. What do you think you are? A dragon?” This allows Gregor to say: “I myself don’t know what I am. I haven’t seen myself yet” (48). When Shahrzad tells him that he is indeed a bug and that he can see himself by turning his antenna toward himself, Gregor finally confronts his physiological transformation: “It was the first time that he saw himself. He was saddened and embarrassed by the dust and debris covering his ungainly body” (48). Although Gregor is not keen to rest his

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 gaze on himself and instead focuses on his new companion, he is nevertheless drawn out of his isolation and denial: “No, there is no doubt. You are a bug, but your wings are not fully formed. I don’t know, maybe you have not put them to work enough. But what a sight if your wings were to develop and you were to fly with this body!” The very body that Gregor had come to abhor now becomes the focus of the female visitor’s attention. She discovers the apple stuck on his back: “Hang on a second . . . What’s happened to your back? It is as if someone wanted to plant an apple tree on your back. I imagine it hurts, right?” (49). The newcomer attends to Gregor’s physical and psychological wounds; she pries the apple from his back and listens to him narrate his life and its culmination in Conclusion 147 his metamorphosis. In addition to being a good listener, Shahrzad weighs in at crucial moments of Gregor’s narrative to validate his sense of isolation from his family and their lack of empathy. Her assertion that he cannot expect humans to understand his new form of existence disengages him from his earlier preoccupation with explaining himself to his family. As Gregor later tells her, through her he finds peace: “How happy I am to have met you! Your friendship has given my life a new meaning – something I searched for my entire life. I will be grateful to you to the end of my days. I will love you with all my being” (72). What leads to Gregor’s utterance is Shahrzad’s own story. Her third-person narration, like the Thousand and One Nights , begins with a king being betrayed by his wife and taking vengeance upon young women he weds and has executed at dawn until Shahrzad intervenes. By engaging the king, in stories she tells him every night she saves other women from death. But the story takes a different turn when the king charges Shahrzad with entertaining his other wives and concubines with her stories that make them unfaithful to him. Shahrzad finds this unjust: she thinks that the women have no obligation to remain faithful to a dim-witted man who feels no responsibility toward them. The king turns his wrath on Shahrzad, but she escapes with the help of the very women “who had learned from her to be unfaithful to the king” (71–2). She beds one of the king’s black slaves, who, fearing for his life, retreats to a corner like a bug. From their union there emerges generations of bugs of whom Shahrzad is one offspring. In this rewriting of the Thousand and One Nights’ frame story, Eslamieh foregrounds women’s oppression at the hand of a ruthless king. As the Shahrzad of Eslamieh’s narrative points out, her foremother’s revenge is long overdue and is born out of thousands of years of male domination: “Like all my kind, I am from the same line as the woman who for a thousand and one nights managed to calm that crazy butcher of a king” (70). Instead of a female protagonist skillful at tam- ing the king, Eslamieh opts for a character driven by a desire for justice. She gives up her existence as a human being but is reborn in generations of female bugs who memorialize her courage. The Shahrzad Gregor encounters in Eslamieh’s story helps him grasp the source of his metamorphosis. When in an earlier exchange, Gregor tells Shahrzad about his self-abasement for the sake of his family, she responds: “Yes, this is precisely the same bug existence, becoming a bug, or the sense of being a bug. I know how painful it is for a person who once believed that paradise was created for him” (57).

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 The comfort and support Shahrzad provides makes Gregor recognize the growing gulf separating him from his family. It is particularly painful for him to hear his mother say: “We did not deserve this. He did not have the right to go to sleep one night and turn into something scary and repellant. He did not have the right to metamorphose himself without my permission” (99). And overhearing their discussion, Gregor realizes: “They’re deciding about my death” (102). While Meta- morphosis ends with Gregor dying alone, Eslamieh’s sequel provides him with Shahrzad’s company and words of solace. Just before Gregor takes his last breath, she says: “ ‘my dear, be patient because soon you too will be at peace. Remember that you were always in my thoughts, are now, and will be evermore. You and I 148 Conclusion will never, ever, die.’ In that darkness she stared at Gregor and did not take her gaze off him until the church clock rang out: one, two, three” (110–11). Eslamieh’s narrative, like Kafka’s, ends with Gregor’s death, but as the family members take stock of their being freed from the burden Gregor’s metamorphosis had imposed on them, the maid rushes in to tell them that the apartment is over- taken, presumably by Shahrzad and Gregor’s offspring: “The house is filled up. Come see, every room, the kitchen, everywhere!” (112). The story Eslamieh creates from Kafka’s offers an interesting insight into the history of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in Persian. The inspiration and potential that Hedayat discovered through his own translation of the novella has continued to fascinate other Iranian translators, who have been in turn inspired to revisit Hedayat’s translation and retell it in their own words, not unlike the way in which the Thousand and One Nights has circulated in modern Persian. As Kamran Ras- tegar points out,

While the heritage of the Nights cannot be denied a claim to Persian, Arabic, Greek, and Indian classical origins, the particular material circumstances that led to its appearance cannot be detached from the conditions of modernity, in European, Ottoman, Arab, Indian colonial, and Qajar Iranian domains. If not for the early coincidental “discovery” of a manuscript by Galland – reworked through and overlaid by the very specific local market pressures he faced – it remains very uncertain that Arabic and Persian-reading audiences would have come to even know the text, much less to evaluate it as canonical to their literary heritage. Instead of resting upon the classical evocations of the text, the editing, and translation of the Nights for nineteenth-century Arabic and Persian readerships resulted in texts marked by “innovation” in style, and autonomy from traditional forms of legitimization. (71–2)

Eslamieh makes explicit what is implicit in the history of translation in modern Persian, takes translation as a means of transmutation to its full potential, and offers an ending that promises endless metamorphoses that bring together the vermin of Metamorphosis into conversation with otherworldly creatures of the Thousand and One Nights . Mostafa Eslamieh’s rescue of Kafka’s protagonist might serve as an apt met-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 aphor for how Persian literary expression could be freed of the constraint of measuring itself against European traditions. In Eslamieh’s rewriting of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, we glimpse a syncretic vision that casts aside the task of the translator and imagines a new ending. Drawing at once on Kafka and the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, Eslamieh reestablishes the possibility of different literary traditions, Persian as well as Arabic and German, serving as a springboard for creativity in Persian. Returning to Jamalzadeh by way of Pirzad and Eslamieh, we can move beyond seeing Iranian identity and culture in the singular and we can also discard the pathologization of Iranian culture. Iranians today, we might say as a response to Jamalzadeh, cannot be easily categorized. The multitude of ways they embody Conclusion 149 Iranianness represent a long and complex cultural history that reflects the position the Iranian plateau has occupied at the crossroads of many languages, ethnicities, religions, and cultures. The very past that is at times fetishized as the only source of pride can then become a site of exploration for the less popularized aspects of Iran’s pre-Islamic past. When confronted with issues of linguistic purity, we could have recourse to the use of multiple languages in an empire that embraced more than one language or religion. An Iranian American once asked me whether the language we were using during our meeting would have been understood by Cyrus the Great. The question startled me for how effectively it underscored a barely disguised desire to live in the past, or at least have the past converge with the present. This nostalgic penchant, while not new in Iranian cultural history, is particularly troubling in its most recent iteration. Faced with the image of contemporary Iran as a pariah state bent on propagating a brand of religious intolerance and remaining hostile to the West, Iranian Americans search for validations of a distinct Iranian heritage and identity. When talking about Iran evokes shame and hostility, to say nothing of anxiety on the part of the Iranian, escaping into the memory of a glorified ancient past is understandable. But there might be a different way of talking about Iranian culture by shifting the focus to the multiplicity of ways that one can be Persian and Iranian. The uniformity imposed by the Islamic Republic can be countered with the varied and even contradictory manifestations of Iranianness. The seeming intractability of the current state-imposed Iranian identity provides a good point of departure for supplementing the image. The reply I should have given my interlocutor curious about the differences between Cyrus the Great’s Persian and ours came to me years later in the form of a turn of phrase I learned from an Iranian satirist. “How in the age of computers and the Internet do we describe a dimwit in Persian?” asked the satirist rhetorically. The answer, “We say, googlesh serch nadareh ,” i.e., “His or her Google doesn’t have a search function.”

Note 1 Translations from the Persian are my own.

Works cited Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Bigdeli Khamseh, Manuchehr. Trans. Maskh [Metamorphosis]. Tehran: Nobahar, 2008. Eslamieh, Mostafa. Donbalehe maskh ya bazgasht-gregor samsa [Continuation of Meta- morphosis, or the Return of Gregor Samsa]. Tehran: Nilufar, 1999. Hedayat, Sadeq. Trans. Maskh [Metamorphosis]. Trans. 4th ed. Tehran: Parastu, 1965. Jamalzadeh, Mohammad Ali. Kholqiat-e ma Iranyan . 1967. Los Angeles: Ketab, 2009. Kamshad, Hassan and Nahid Mozzafari. “Jamalzadeh, Mohammad-Ali, ii. Work.” Ency- clopaedia Iranica , 10 April 2012. Web. 29 Dec. 2014. Rastegar, Kamran. Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures . New York: Routledge, 2007. Taheri, Farzaneh. Maskh-i franz kafka/Darbarih-i Maskh . 8th ed. Tehran: Nilufar, 2012. This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Index

Abbas (Shah) 50 Balibar, Étienne 10, 128 Adab-e ziyart [The Pilgrim’s Rules of Barmakids 20, 39n8 Etiquette] (Modarressi) 108, 109–10, Barthes, Roland 7 112, 119 Basmanji, Kaveh 64 Afkhami, Gholam Reza 25–7 Beeman, William O. 68 Agassi, Andre 70 The Book of Absent People (Modarressi) Aghassi 70 see Ketab-e adamha-ye ghayeb Ahmad, Al-e 87, 144 Boym, Svetlana 2 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 63, 64 Brod, Max 145 Alik (Armenian newspaper) 139 Bum, Oscar 145 alterities, internal 13, 127–41 “Ambiguous Universality” (Balibar) 128–9 calendars, Iranian and Islamic 25–6, 143 American culture in Iran 55, 61n5; see also censorship 65 Western culture Cheragha ra man khamush mikonam Answer to History (Mohammad Reza Shah [I Will Turn Off the Lights] (Pirzad) Pahlavi) 17, 30 127; see also Things We Left Unsaid aqaliat 128, 140 (Pirzad) Arab Iranians 127, 133, 141n5 Christians 40n8; Armenian 119–20, 127, Arabic language 19–20, 29–31, 33; 128, 134 influence on New Persian 105 codes of conduct, Islamic Republic 8, Armenians: as Christians 119–20, 127, 70, 72 128, 134; identity of 127, 135; in Iran conspiracy theories 45–6 49–50, 119–20; as Iranians 132; in The Continuation of Metamorphosis, or modern Persian novels 141n4; marriage the Return of Gregor Samsa (Eslamieh) to Muslims 134, 138; schools for in Iran 145 128, 134 cultural history 8, 12, 14, 34, 43, 51, 56, Asadi, Houshang 48–9 66, 77, 86, 127, 149; disavowal of 17; Asayesh, Gelareh 86 modern Iranian 129; and the Persian

Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Ashuri, Dariush 4–5 language 29, 124; Shi’ite 32; see also Assyrians 127 Iranian culture Atashin, Faegheh see Googoosh cultural identity: defined 8–9; Iranian 1, Azeris 127 3, 82, 124, 145; internalization of 8; Azraye khalvat neshin [The Virgin of and the Persian language 13; in Project Solitude] (Modarressi): plot synopsis Misplaced 99; Shah’s perception of 17 116–20; translation of 113–16, 120–1 cultural memory(ies) 14, 39, 43, 47, 49, 113 Baba Taher 104 cultural norms 2 Baha’is 127, 128 Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Bajoghli, Ramin 85 Confronting the West (Shayegan) 9 152 Index culture: American 55, 61n5; and identity 2; Ghanoonparvar, M.R. 113, 114, 125n3 Iranian 4–7; Western 9, 65 gharbzadegi 87, 102nn1–2, 116 Cyrus Cylinder 39, 41n16 Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories Cyrus the Great 28, 104, 149; tomb of 25–7 of Imprisonment in Iran (Talebi) 48 Googoosh 12, 43–5, 49, 51–3; current Dabashi, Hamid 9, 105 career 52–3; early career of 49, 51; dancing, edicts against 67, 80 years of silence 45, 51–2; see also “Q.Q. Dar al-Fonun 7 Bang Bang” A Day Before Easter (Pirzad) 127; see also Green Movement 63 The Space Between Us Gregorian calendar 143 Dear Uncle Napoleon (Pezeshkzad) 16, 38 Grigor, Talinn 31 Debating Muslims (Fischer and Abedi) 6–7 deterritorialization 13, 73, 113, 114, Hafez 104 119–21 Hall, Stuart 3, 8 diaspora, Iranian see Iranian diaspora Hedayat, Sadeq 145, 148 diaspora Iranians see Iranians, diaspora Herzfeld, Ernst 30, 40nn12–13 disavowal 17, 26, 28, 29, 39n1, 43, 44, 67, Hirsch, Marianne 45 82, 138 history: of the ‘Abbasids 40n8; disavowal Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran of 44; Armenian 13, 50–1, 128; (Homayounpour) 3, 11 ideologically constructed 43, 47–8; dress codes, Islamic Republic 8, 72, 78, Iranian 4–5, 8, 9–10, 30, 40n12, 55, 81, 82 64, 76, 86, 88, 127, 144; of Iranian universities 7; Islamic 25, 29, 40n14, “Ed McMahon is Iranian” (Salari) 101 105; in Mashallah Khan 17, 18, 20, education, in Armenian schools 128, 134 24, 32–5; of the Persian language 34, elections, in June (2009) 48, 52, 63, 64, 66 40n14; of Persian translation 148; of the Elling, Rasmus Christian 132 revolution 56, 58–9, 77; rewriting of Endjavi-Barbé Art Projects 102 16–17, 35; shared 8; Shi’ite 32; see also English language, juxtaposition with cultural history Persian 110–11; see also translation Hoffmann, E.T.A. 99 paradigms; translation theory Homayounpour, Gohar 3–4, 11, 85 Esfandiary, F.M. 106, 108 humanism 8; Persian literary 105–6 Eslamieh, Mostafa 143, 145–8 ethnic minorities 10, 127, 140; see also identity: ambiguous aspects of 11; Armenians Armenian 127, 135; constructions of “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora” 12, 90; and culture 2; masculine 22–3, (Rakhadrishnan) 100 40n9, 77, 79; mistaken 71–6, 79–80, 85; exile 2, 8, 12, 35, 48, 102n4, 104, 105, national 13, 131; politics of 12; racial 86; 108, 109–10; of Googoosh 45; of see also cultural identity; Iranian identity Herzfeld 40n12; inner 120; language of Identity Card (Esfandiary) 106–8 120; in Maxx 62, 64, 67, 73, 75, 76, 80; International Socialist Bureau (ISB) 136 in “Q.Q. Bang Bang” 49, 52, 57, 59, 60, International Society for Iranian Studies 7 60n1; of the Shah 17, 30 Iran: Armenians in 49–51, 119–20; Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 calendar in 25–6, 143; film production Farhang (culture) 4–7, 11 in 65–6; and the myth of racial Farivar, Shiva 63 distinction 33–4, 40nn12–13, 86–7; Farsi 102n3 see also Persian language non-Muslims in 10, 127, 140, 141n6; fetishization 73, 77, 149 pre-Islamic 29–31, 34, 39n8, 40n14; Fischer, Michael 6 see also history, Iranian; Iranian culture Freud, Sigmund 98–9, 102n6 Irangeles 62, 71, 89, 93; see also Los Angeles; Tehrangeles Gavaznha [Deer] (film) 58 Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles 85 geopolitics 10 Iranian Alliances Across Borders (IAAB) 85 Index 153 Iranian Americans 2, 85; displaced 3; and Ja’far Kahn az farang amadeh the importance of a successful image 85 [Ja’far Kahn is Back from Europe] Iranian culture 148–9; divide between (Moghadam) 116 Iran and Iranian American 81–2; and Jamalzadeh, Mohammad Ali 116, 143–4, Eslamieh’s reworking of Metamorphosis 148 145–9; intersections of religion, Jews 24, 40n8, 86, 128 ethnicity and language in 132–3; under justice, social and political 61n6 Khatami 65; modern 88, 143; and the Persian language 124, 145; see also Kafka, Franz 145 cultural history; cultural identity; Kelley, Ron 85 cultural memory(ies) Ketab-e adamha-ye ghayeb [The Book of Iranian diaspora 1, 11, 12, 45–6, 85, 89; Absent People] (Modarressi) 108, 112, in Los Angeles 13, 44, 48, 49, 53, 60, 115 60n1, 62, 64, 66, 84–6, 89, 98, 100–1; Khamseh, Manuchehr Bigdeli 145 misfits and failures in 100; see also Khan, Sattar 94, 102n5 Irangeles; Tehrangeles Khatami, Mohammad 64–5 Iranian identity 8–9, 137, 140–1, 148–9; Khomeini, Ayatollah 47, 51, 67, 88 of Armenians 132; “authentic” 64; Kia, Sadeq 4 different conceptions of 127; in exile Kimiai, Masud 58 73; and the Iranian diaspora 66; media Kristeva, Julia 98, 102n6 depictions of 63; modern 49, 143; past Kurds 127 and present 60; and the Persian language 104 –5, 107, 124; pre-revolution vs. Lang, George 125n2 post-revolution 128; as public relations language: loss of 118–24; see also Arabic issue 88–9 language; English language; Persian Iranian Nationality and the Persian language Language (Meskoob) 34, 105 Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, Iranian Revolution 63, 77; contested and Imprisonment in Iran (Asadi) 48 memories of 48; official version of 47; Liberal OC (newsletter) 63 people’s support for 45–8; and “Q.Q. Life and Times of the Shah (Afkhami) 25 Bang Bang” 44, 49; see also Islamic locusts 133 Revolution Los Angeles, Iranian diaspora in 13, 44, Iranians: Arab 127, 133, 141n5; 48, 49, 53, 60, 60n1, 62, 64, 66, 84–6, characterization of 144; diaspora 6, 89, 98, 100–1; see also Irangeles; 12, 43, 45, 48, 53, 63, 66, 78; see also Tehrangeles Iranian Americans; Iranian diaspora; Los Angeles Marashi, Afshin 25, 26, 31 Islam: conquest of Iran by 29; conversion Marcus, George 7 to 34, 118, 119; and Iranian culture 88, marginalization 49–50; of diaspora 125n1; and Iranian identity 87; Shi’ite Iranians 85 63, 68 marriage, between Muslims and Armenian Islamic movement 51 Christians 134, 138 Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) 8, 47–8, Masa ‘el-e Iran [Iran’s Problems] Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 49, 51, 55–6, 95, 141n2, 149; abuses of (magazine) 143 power by 47–8; and the “authentic” Iran Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun 62–3; codes of conduct 8, 70, 72; dress al-Rashid [Mashallah Khan in the Court codes 8, 72, 81, 82; in Maxx 64–7, 72, of Harun al-Rashid ] (Pezeshkzad) 12, 77–8, 80, 81 16–17, 144; analysis of 24–5, 28–36, Islamic Revolution 34, 39; see also Iranian 38–9; cover of 21; issue of language in Revolution 19–20, 29–33, 35, 105; Mashallah in Islamists 56, 59 eighth-century Baghdad 19–20, 28–9, I Will Turn Off the Lights (Pirzad) 127; 31–2, 35–6, 38–9; Mashallah in the see also Things We Left Unsaid (Pirzad) harem 20, 22–3; Mashallah in the lion’s 154 Index cage 23, 87; Mashallah in the present Naficy, Hamid 51, 62, 83, 98 day 18–19, 23–4, 28; myth of racial Nafisi, Azar 48 distinction in 33–4; serialization of names, transliteration of 71 17–18; synopsis of plot 18–20, 22–4; Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 5–6 theme of time travel in 25, 28 national identity 13, 131 Maxx (film) 12, 62, 64, 66, 144; addressing nationalism, Iranian 35, 40n14, 133 the issue of brain drain 66–7, 69–70, nationality, Iranian 105, 120; see also 80; on finding common ground 76–8, Iranian identity 80–1; interpretation of 76–81; mistaken Nationalizing Iran (Marashi) 25 identification in 71–6, 79–80; plot New Persian 29, 105; see also Persian synopsis 66–78; political satire in 78–9; language poster 69 norms, cultural 2 media, government control of 63 memory see cultural memory(ies) Old Testament, Persian translation of 109 Meskoob, Shahrokh 8, 34–5, 105 Ordoubadi, Simon see Project Misplaced: Metamorphosis (Kafka) 145, 148; see also The Rise and Fall of Simon Ordoubadi The Continuation of Metamorphosis of (Mortazavi) middle Persian language 4, 29; see also “The Other I My (Own and Proper) Persian language Unconscious” (Kristeva) 98–9 migrations 45, 62, 124; forced 50–1, 132; “Our Iranian Character Traits” to the United States 108, 110 (Jamalzadeh) 143 Milani, Abbas 57 Milani, Farzaneh 22 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah 12, 16, minorities: ethnic 10, 127, 140; religious 25–8, 30, 51, 62, 88, 90 127, 141n6; see also Armenians Pahlavi, Reza Shah 26–7, 30, 128 minor literature 113, 114 Pahlbod, Mehrdad 26 Modarressi, Taghi 13, 104, 108, 145; Passerini, Luisa 44 English translations of his own Persian Persepolis 26 writing 112–13; “internal voice” of “Persian is Sugar” (Jamalzadeh) 116 111–12; on writing in Persian 115–16 Persian language 13, 19–20, 29–33, 35, Modarressi’s works: Adab-e ziyart [The 76, 145; and the children of immigrants Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette] 108, 124; and Iranian identity 104–5, 124; 109–10, 112, 119; Azraye khalvat juxtaposition with English 110–11; neshin [The Virgin of Solitude] 113–21; loss of facility with 118–24; middle Ketab-e adamha-ye ghayeb [The Book Persian 4, 29; in Modarressi’s writing of Absent People] 108, 112, 115; Sharif 110–13; new Persian 29, 105; in Project Jan 108; “Writing with an Accent” Misplaced 91–3 109–10; Yakolia and Her Loneliness Persian Letters (Montesquieu) 106 108–9 Persian literary humanism 105–6 modernity 7, 9–10, 25–6, 29, 31, 40n9, “The Persian Phase of Islamic 82, 148 Civilization” (Yarshater) 125n1 Moghadam, Hasan 116 Pezeshkzad, Iraj 12, 16–18, 31, 35–6, 144 Moghadam, Saman 12, 62, 64, 66, 84 Pezeshkzad’s works: Dear Uncle Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Mohammadi, Ali 55 Napoleon 16, 38; see also Mashallah Mohammadi, Annabelle Sreberny 55 Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid monarchists 62–4 The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette Mortazavi, Houman 13, 85, 89–90, (Modarressi) see Adab-e ziyart 97–100; return to Iran 101–2 Pirzad, Zoya 13, 14, 127, 145 Mousavi, Mir Hossein 63 Pirzad’s works: The Space Between music, edicts against 67 134–40; Things We Left Unsaid 129–33; music videos 44, 60n1 Yek ruz mandeh beh eid-e pak [A Day Muslims, marriage to Armenian Christians before Easter] 127 134, 138 political justice 61n6 ‘My Dear, Loveable Sir’ 51 Politics and the Other Scene (Balibar) 10 Index 155 postmemory 45 Ta’rifha va mafhim-e farhang [Definitions Project Misplaced: The Rise and Fall and Meanings of Farhang] (Ashuri) 4 of Simon Ordoubadi (Mortazavi) 13, Taheri, Farzaneh 145 85; cultural identity in 99; linguistic Talebi, Shahla 47, 48–9 hybridity in 97; linguistic nuance in Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad 9, 10 92–3; mistaken identity in 85; mock Tehran Avenue (Bajoghli) 85 interview in 96–7, 99; Ordoubadi Tehran Bureau 85 as political candidate 91–6; original Tehrangeles 62, 71, 80, 81, 82, 85, 89–90; concept of 89; racial identity in 87 see also Irangeles; Los Angeles Project Misplaced posters: “I am temporality 53, 144 gooder” 91–3; “I govern you good” Things We Left Unsaid (Pirzad) 129–33 poster 95; “We son of king kouroush” Thousand and One Nights 20, 147, 148 poster 104 Translating the Garden (Ghanoonparvar) 113, 125n3 “Q.Q. Bang Bang” (Googoosh) 12, 43–5, translation paradigms 125n2 144; album cover and liner notes 53–4; translation theory, foreignization vs. analysis of 54–60; double temporality domestication 112, 114 of 53; lyricist of 49–50; and modern transliteration 71 Iranian identity 49; and the revolution transnationalism 49–50 44, 49; target audience for 53; video Tyler, Anne 113, 115 rendition of 54–60 universality 128–9 racial distinction myth 33–4, 40nn12–13, 86–7 Vahdat, Farzin 7 Radhakrishnan, R. 100 veils, for women 78 Rastegar, Kamran 148 The Virgin of Solitude (Modarressi) 104; Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi) 48 see also Azraye khalvat neshin reality, manipulation of 33–8 religious intolerance 149 Western culture 65; see also American religious minorities 127, 141n6 culture restorative nostalgia 2, 8, 39 women: Armenian 131; banned from Reza (Imam) 32 performing in public 44, 51, 68; Robinson, Doug 114 dress code for 8, 72, 78, 81, 82; in ruhozi 68 modern Persian novels 141n4; Muslim Rushdie, Salman 88 131; oppression of 147; rejection of traditional religion by 81–2; in Shi’ite Safavid dynasty 50–1 law 68; stereotypes of 22; wearing veils Salari, Maryam 101 78; and women’s sexuality 68, 82–3n1 Sanasarian Eliz 128, 136, 140 The World of Persian Literary Humanism Schmidt, Eric 26 (Dabashi) 105 Shamlu, Ahmad 58, 61n6 “Writing with an Accent” (Modarressi) Shariati, Ali 88 109–10 Sharif Jan (Modarressi) 108 Downloaded by [New York University] at 23:56 05 August 2016 Shay, Anthony 67 Yakolia and Her Loneliness (Modarressi) Shayegan, Daryoush 9 108–9 Shi’ite Islam 63, 68 Yarshater, Ehsan 105, 125n1 social justice 61n6 Yavari, Houra 40 The Space Between Us (Pirzad) 134–5; Yek ruz mandeh beh eid-e pak [A Day part one “Sour Cherry Stones” 135–7, before Easter] (Pirzad) 127; see also The 138, 139–40; part two “Seashells” Space Between Us 137–8; part three “White Violets” 137, 138–9 Zakarian, Zoya 49, 51 Spitzer, Leo 45 Zia-Ebrahimi, Reza 33 Sunnis 127, 128 Zoroastrians 127