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Susan Bazargan Susan, who came to the United States for graduate study and chose not to return to Iran after the revolution, who now teaches English literature at Eastern Illinois University, translated twelve of the Persian tapes and read most of this manuscript in an earlier incarnation. When I asked if I could include her story, she said she would prefer not to be interviewed; she preferred, she said, to provide her own essay on exile written after she read this manuscript. Hers, therefore, is a narrative written in a different mode: the self-reflexive musings of an Iranian academician in the United States who chooses to opt for a form other than the spontaneously oral. I choose it as the last selection as a response to the narratives that precede it. Persian Letters Letter One The difference between here and there is the letter “t.” A sign, a floating signifier—that is one place to begin discussing exile. Having lived away from Iran for the last twenty years, I find my imaginary wanderings to “home” and back taking more and more the shape of letters. As missives from home, letters arrive bearing heavy stamps, images with unfamiliar referents. But letters also carry me back to the Persian alphabet—the aleph-ba. I cross from English to Farsi, “t” transforming into the small “teh” and the large “teh.” In elementary school in Tehran, I wrote endless pages of “mashgh” both at school and home to master the Persian script. And so I would write words like “toot” (white mulberry—its sweetness and fragrance float in memory), which started with the small “t” and ended with the large “t,” over and over again, using a reed pen and an inkpot. The lowly pencil could not do the job—it did not allow the fingers to impose the needed pressure on paper to form the delicate bends and twists, the tangents and swerves of Farsi letters. Fountain pens were allowed only after third grade and ball point pens were forbidden. And so in first grade, 254 here: reconstructing migration and exile my fingers guided the tortuous dance of letters on paper as I practiced the intricacies of Persian calligraphy. A minor crisis occurred when the tip of the reed pen broke; it had to be taken up to the teacher who sharpened it with a special knife. At home, a few times without my parents’ knowledge, I used a razor blade to sharpen the pens myself. I had to be extra cautious not to cut myself. The inkpot posed another problem. The ink would spill—on my hands, on the finished homework, on my clothes, even once on brand-new furniture my parents had bought—after months of saving—for Norooz. My physicist father brought all sorts of chemicals home from the lab to clean the damned spot, but to no avail. Writing was not an easy task, I realized; it could cut; it could spill over and stain. But writing also produced “calli-graphy”— calli, kallos, beauty. And so it was in the arduous, repeated task of dipping unreliable reed pens into ink and writing that I learned to connect the body with a site, a location, a blank page and letters. Letter Two One-thousand-and-one nights. Night is another locale of exile. Day organized by work carries the rhythms of the adopted culture. But the night is free, one’s own time, time to roam and remember. The Chinese-box narrative framework of the one-thousand-and-one-nights tales I read as a child structures my own story. One begins at the beginning but then realizes that her narrative unfolds as a series of physical and psychological displacements, one tale containing another that contains (and is contained in) multiple others. I remember the relief I felt as a child—reading late at night yet another tale of Sinbad the sailor—when the “first,” originary narrator would finally reappear in the story and bring it to a closure. I knew then that Sinbad was home and safe and I could go to sleep. Exile is the impossibility of recovering that first narrator and the safety of home. In insomnia lies exile. Having lost the first narrator, one understands the lesson of Scheherazade—that survival of the self lies in one’s ability to compose endless narratives of the self. Nocturnal returns to home can also take the shape of disturbing dreams. My recurring one includes the...

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