In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 5 Epilogue Whereas some of the narratives above orchestrate history, displacement, and exile with melancholic loss, others have used that loss as the scaffolding for possibility (even as identity itself is premised on lack) and find ways to fill in that lack with compensatory possibilities. The narratives collected here provide a sense of identity and history as palimpsest—remembered, reified, and refashioned in the present. My strategy throughout has attempted to represent the narratives surrounding exile. Ideally, these stories will complicate the current state of cultural criticism about Iran, will get around the “unget -aroundable fact that all ethnographical descriptions . . . are the describer’s descriptions, and not those of the described” (Geertz 1973, 145), and therefore serve as a means to liberate both speakers and readers from the past as silence, stereotype, or nightmare. Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi describe Iranian culture as “woven on a geographically situated loom, one beam end set in Iran and one set abroad in America and Europe” (1990, 254). They distinguish between the suspended paralysis of the exile (avareh) who lives in a world of memory, and the fertile mobility of the migrant (muhajir) whose assimilation nevertheless cannot “project into a future that gives the present significance” (255). The most famous Iranian poet and writer to elaborate on distinctions between exile and migration was Gholam Hossein Saedi, who died in exile in 1985. Although he understood the titles given to his condition—political and existential exile (tabeed and ghorbat)—he preferred the word barsakhi (purgatorial despair/limbo) for the state in which he found himself. Unlike the immigrant who has chosen to join the diasporic community and gradually blend into the larger alien culture, the exile, he says, has no choice and therefore cares only about his loneliness: 262 epilogue The exile . . . is a vagabond who cannot gather the scattered parts of his being. . . . For a long time, he clings to his past identity . . . clinging to the memories of his country, clinging to the memories of his friends and companions, companions of struggle, companions in ideology, clinging to a few verses by Hafez, or to stories he remembers; sometimes clinging to using a few idiomatic expressions to spice up his speech, or to telling a joke and making others laugh. (Saedi 1993, 33) Unlike the exile, the Iranian migrants are not, in Saedi’s words, confused and crippled: “Death never stalked them with its long, sharp scythe, with its machine guns and semiautomatics. Neither the former regime nor the present one ever bothered them” (32). Saedi’s anxious and alcohol-driven exile lives in fatigue and hunger; his worst sickness is fear and dread of expulsion from the host country, and even of such mundane happenings as a ring at the door or the glance of an unarmed policeman (33). He defines his exilic state as that of a dead person pretending to be alive. Imprisoned by both regimes, Saedi died, or drank himself to death, in Paris in 1985. The purpose of my work has been to offer alternative narratives to those reified by any single source or by images in mass media. I assume, along with Adorno and Horkheimer, that all reification is a forgetting, and that what it forgets can be partially recovered in the inexplicable, fluid, and unstable memory of another, in an other’s story that recalls the matrix that produced all the others. In collecting these stories, my intention is not to valorize or sentimentalize the idea of origins, be it contained in the concepts of “home,” “religion,” “nation,” “language,” or “motherland.” Along with Adorno, I believe in a healthy dose of suspicion toward the “nature” of past attachments: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (Adorno 1974, 39). Homes, families, clans, nations, and languages can be safe havens or prisons, or both. Said and Auerbach, both writers in exile, quote the twelfth-century monk Hugo of St. Victor who wrote: The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. (Hugo of St. Victor, 1961) The voices in this book, however, are not those...

Share