Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora

Hamid Naficy

Hamid Naficy In earlier sections, Hamid Naficy, who currently teaches at Rice University in Houston, Texas, has told of his childhood in Isfahan and of his work in Tehran’s open university. He left Iran in 1978 on sabbatical leave and expected to return after a year. He starts with a meditation on the word “exile ” and continues to reflect on deterritorialization and reterritorialization in the postnational, postrevolutionary world. I choose to follow his narrative with that of Ramin Sobhan because Sobhan’s reification of a pre-Islamic Iran illustrates a problem Naficy theorizes. Iranians are sensitive about the term “exile” because most understand it to mean Tab’eed, or political exile, which has negative connotations. And I’m not exiled in that sense of the term. But there’s another sense of exile for which the Iranian word ghorbat [the feeling, regardless of circumstance, of estrangement] is perhaps more approximate. If we use that variation of the term, we could say that I am in exile. But I have problems with all that because these meanings of “exile” imply that I was living at some age in an authentic, stable, unified country and that I was united with it and then suddenly something happened and I became separated, disunited, fragmented, and exiled. Both the unity of the former and the disunity of the latter are illusory, however. During my own life major transformations have occurred in the way we experience space and time. Since the 1950s we have entered a different world. It is a world where we may live in geographically-bounded terrains called countries, but ideologically and symbolically we are crossing those boundaries with greater facility and rapidity. In a sense I think Westernization in Iran and my own contact with the West were, in effect, the beginning of my exile. And I mean this as a positive thing, because this sort of exile introduces you to new ideas. It puts you in touch with other ways of producing meanings and it makes you aware of the pitfalls of the chauvinistic nationalism to which you might have been subjected prior to the distance of exile. Exile allows you more room for self-criticism and selfconstruction , as it were. When you have more discourses available, you have hamid naficy 239 more elbow room to move around in. And so I see exile as a largely positive experience. I did not become aware of these issues until years later. In fact, until I began to write an autobiographical essay and my Ph.D. dissertation, I really hadn’t thought about these issues seriously. Because of physical travel, because of global interconnection through media, news, and popular culture, people are becoming so hybridized that everybody is exiled in one way or another. Everyone operates in situations and in environments that are not necessarily of their own making but are of their choosing. Obviously, not everybody chooses. Some people are forced to flee El Salvador or Iran or whatever to go somewhere else because they can’t live where they are. But in the end when they reach their destination, they may be able to choose the kind of amalgamation of cultures that they want to belong to. So I don’t look with pain at not being in Iran. One of the characteristics of exile is deterritorialization, and by that I mean the full range of displacements that it engenders. One, of course, is physical separation from home, from the past, from the family, and so forth. But the other has to do with certain losses and shifts in status. You have a job, you have a particular status back home. You move across borders and things are changed. You can’t go back. You don’t have access to the money or property or whatever you once had, so you have to live a different lifestyle. Your status changes. Your job changes. Your human relationships change. Most importantly, the language you use every day is not there anymore. So both physically and symbolically, everything that you construct your world with is transformed. What I mean by deterritorialization, then, is the physical, symbolic, and ideological terrains that have shifted as though by tectonic force. So for me it has been financially very hard. In terms of status it has also been very hard. I had a fairly high-level job that was secure in Iran. But it just so happened that exile also coincided...