Farsi Shekar Ast? The Language(s) of Belonging in Iran and its Diaspora

While a good deal of historiographical scholarship in Iranian Studies has emphasized the role of language politics in shaping Iranian national identity, very little research has examined the aesthetic and affective dimensions of this linguistic consciousness as it plays out in modern Persian literature.  This panel proposes to put existing studies of cultural history into dialogue with close readings of literary texts so as to probe not just the politics, but also the poetics of Iranian linguistic identity.  Papers will explore how national and diasporic authors represent the felt experiences of belonging to a collectivity defined in large part by a common Persian language, considering the ways in which such communities of feeling are reflected in--and shaped by--particular literary forms.

Some of the questions that may be addressed include the following:

•    How does the Persian language circumscribe the discursive terrain of national and cultural belonging, serving as a bridge between individual identity and collective identifications?  How do modern literary texts of Iran and its diaspora cultivate or challenge this intellectual and affective ‘sense’ of home-in-language?

•    In what ways does the elevation--and even fetishization--of the Persian language as a privileged site of identity and belonging reinforce gender hierarchies and exclusionary nationalist paradigms?

•    Given the double status of Persian as both mother tongue—a primordial site of subject formation—and paternal Logos—the language of Law and hegemonic state power—how do minorities and other marginalized groups in Iran negotiate their ambivalent relation to this literary language?  For instance, how do women writers mobilize a language of writing that is overdetermined by patriarchal laws, androcentric gender ideologies, and other socially and culturally-ingrained codes of discursive propriety?

•    In what ways might an uncritical attachment to one’s native language and its literary traditions exacerbate existing anxieties of influence that inhibit formal and generic experimentation?  In other words, how might it be aesthetically disabling for a writer to feel too “at home” in the Persian language?

•    How do first-generation Iranian emigrants evoke their physical uprooting from the homeland in terms of an experience of linguistic exile?  How does their estrangement from both a national Persophone readership and the literary community of their adoptive home impact the thematic and formal development of their work?  To what extent do their dis-placed and un-homed texts resist linguistic and cultural translation? (Panel convenor Guilan Siassi)

Chair
name: 
Guilan Siassi
Institutional Affiliation : 
U.C.L.A.
Academic Bio: 
Guilan Siassi is a doctoral candidate in The Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. She works on world literatures in French, Persian, and English with an emphasis in psychoanalytic and social theory. Her dissertation is entitled “Un(der)writing Home: The Politics and Poetics of Belonging in Modern Literatures of Iran and the Maghreb.
Discussant
Name: 
Kamran Talattof
Institutional Affiliation : 
University of Arizona
Academic Bio : 
Kamran Talattof is the professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Arizona and the author, co-author, or co-editor of The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature; Modern Persian: Spoken and Written with D. Stilo and J. Clinton; Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry with A. Karimi-Hakkak; The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric with J. Clinton; and Contemporary Debates in Islam: An Anthology of Modernist and Fundamentalist Thought with M. Moaddel. He is the co-translator of Women without Men by Shahrnoosh Parsipur, with J. Sharlet and Touba: The Meaning of the Night by Parsipur, with H. Houshmand. Many of his articles focus on gender, ideology, culture, and language.
First Presenter
Name: 
Guilan Siassi
Institutional Affiliation : 
UCLA
Academic Bio : 
[same as above].
Concise Paper Title : 
Mother-Tongue and Father-Word in Jamalzadeh’s 'Farsi Shekar Ast'
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) : 
From the Shu‘ûbiyeh movement of the seventh century (first century A.H.) through the calls for language reform and purification in the twentieth century, the sense of belonging to an Iranian ‘imagined community’ has been articulated in large part through reference to a shared linguistic bond. The construction of political and affective sodalities rooted in a common language was central to late Qajar and early Pahlavi-era attempts to consolidate a burgeoning national identity. But beyond this instrumentalization of the Persian language by public intellectuals and statesmen during the early period of nation-building, many writers and poets have also engaged—either directly or indirectly—with the question of how this language anchors identity within both the domestic sphere and the political realm. Among the earliest and most paradigmatic examples of such literary representations of language problematics in Iran is Seyyed Mohammad Jamalzadeh’s short story invoked in the title of this panel, “Persian is Sweet.” In this paper, I argue that Jamalzadeh’s deceptively simple narrative not only stages the tension between competing idioms of European modernity and Islamic tradition, but more generally juxtaposes the clamorous, Babel-like confusion of tongues among a diverse Iranian populace to the ominous silence of a hegemonic state’s arbitrary rule. Ramazan, the bewildered, comic anti-hero of the story, voices a naïve, but nonetheless powerful desire to escape his dark “prison” of divisive heteroglossia, and return to the comforting familiarity of a ‘true’ Persian language that, he hopes, will make sense of the absurd semiotics of the Law. As such, Jamalzadeh’s story foregrounds a highly emotionally-charged attachment to a transparent ‘maternal’ language against the backdrop of an inscrutable ‘paternal’ Logos. Reconsidering Jamalzadeh’s groundbreaking narrative through the prism of Benedict Anderson’s writings on nationalism, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of heteroglossia and dialogism, and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theorizations of the role of language in subject formation, I propose a new analytic framework for reading the internally-stratified and unstable languages of the incipient Iranian national home as staged in this text.
Second Presenter
Name: 
Amy Motlagh
Institutional Affiliation : 
American University in Cairo
Academic Bio : 
Amy Motlagh is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. Her research interests include modern and classical Iranian and Persophone literature, the post-1979 Iranian diaspora, and intersections among the Arab, Turkish, and Persian literary traditions. Her most recent publications include “Towards a Theory of Iranian American Life Writing” (Multi Ethnic Literatures of the United States Summer 2008) and the short story “A Souvenir of Tehran” (Transit: Tehran, Garnet Press 2008). She is currently at work on a manuscript which explores the relationship between legal reform and the novel in twentieth-century Iran, as well as a series of short stories. Motlagh received her Ph.D. from Princeton University; she also holds an M.F.A. from New York University and a B.A. from Pomona College.
Concise Paper Title : 
Writing Reform from the Margins: Minor(ity) Voices & the Question of Civil Society
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) : 
During the Khatami period, “civil society” (jām‘eh-ye madanī) became a catch phrase in Iranian political discourse, though the exact meaning of the term was unclear. Appropriated by myriad groups in their bids to influence the future of reform, civil society was a concept particularly appealing to feminists, who saw it as a way to redefine women’s status in post-revolutionary Iran. Feminists often entered the debate through the “women’s press,” where their writings questioned or sought to redefine the meaning of words key to legal and political discourse. In this paper, I read Iranian feminists’ gendering of the civil society debate in the women’s press against two coeval popular novels’ use of marriage as a metaphor for women’s marginalized social status in contemporary Iran. Fatāneh Hāj Sāyyed Javādī’s The Morning After (Bāmdād-e Khomār, 1374/1995) and Zoyā Pīrzād’s I Will Turn Off the Lights (Cherāgh'hā rā Man Khāmūsh Mīkonam, 1380/2002) both achieved record sales, but elicited very different critical responses: while leftist critics excoriated The Morning After—one went so far as to call it a novel that “contradicted the principles of civil society”—they responded positively to I Will Turn Off the Lights. Is I Will Turn Off the Lights, then, a novel that promotes civil society where The Morning After stymies it? More specifically, does its vision of companionate marriage and friendships between women promote the values of civil society as they have been conceived by women’s rights activists in contemporary Iran? Pirzad’s status as a member of one of Iran’s “recognized religious minorities” and her explicit “pre-translation” of Armenian themes and language into a Persian literary idiom raise important questions about language use and the enduring significance of Persian to Iran’s literary traditions. Does Pīrzād’s work challenge dominant ethno-religious and linguistic identities, or reinforce them? What are the implications of her writing for the feminist imagination of civil society, which has not explicitly discussed religious or ethnic identity? The paper will examine the utility of Deleuze and Guattari’s problematic theory of “minor literatures” for considering some of these questions, and will frame its discussion of the novels within a broader discursive analysis of the civil society debate as it took place within the pages of the now-defunct journal Zanān.
Thid Presenter
Name: 
Nasrin Rahimieh
Institutional Affiliation : 
University of California, Irvine
Academic Bio : 
Nasrin Rahimieh is a Professor of Comparative Literature and the Maseeh Chair and Director of Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include intercultural encounters between Iran and the West, modern Persian literature, literature of exile and displacement, women’s writing, and post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Her publications include Oriental Responses to the West: Comparative Essays on Muslim Writers from the Middle East (Brill, 1990) and Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural Heritage (Syracuse University Press, 2001). Her reviews and articles have appeared in Iranian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Iran Nameh, The Middle East Journal, The Comparatist, Thamyris, Edebiyat, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Canadian Literature, and New Comparison.
Concise Paper Title : 
Translating Taghi Modarressi’s Writing with an Accent
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) : 
In the 1980s and after a long hiatus, Taghi Modarressi resumed his career as a novelist. Although by then he had settled in the U.S. for quite some time, he felt that the only language in which he could write fiction was Persian. When he subsequently decided to translate his own novels from Persian into English, he drew on a concept he called writing with an accent. He believed that the English translation of his novels had to leave traces of what he considered the untranslatable and his own psychic ambivalences toward linguistic and cultural deracination. He had envisioned a similar process for translating his last novel, The Virgin of Solitude, which he completed before his death in 1997. I inherited the task of completing the translation he had begun shortly before his death. As his translator, I became deeply immersed in his writing and his unique approach to translation. In this presentation I will focus on what became my dual task of translating The Virgin of Solitude into English and also editing the Persian original for publication. I will analyze the constant interplay of alienation and belonging underpinning Modarressi’s fiction and his use of language, both Persian and English.
Fourth Presenter
Name: 
Babak Elahi
Academic Bio : 
Babak Elahi is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, His research interests include Ethnic Studies, Immigration and diaspora, American Realism, and Modern Iranian Literature and Film. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled The Iranian Condition: Illness as Metaphor in Moodern Iranian Literature and Film.
Concise Paper Title : 
The Fleshless Word: Defamiliarizing Language and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) : 
Kader Abdolah’s My Father’s Notebook: A Novel of Iran, translated from the original Dutch into English by Susan Massotty, draws on Persian language and poetry as it describes how a deaf mute acquires literacy. This distanced relationship to the written and spoken word can be read as a metaphor for the socio-linguistic situation of Iranians living abroad who know the culture, literature, and language of Iran, but outside its visceral—oral and aural—reality. Like Aga Akbar, the deaf-mute in Abdolah’s narrative, we experience the word without flesh. However, it is his distance from the written and spoken word that allows Aga Akbar to re-imagine language and transform his world. Metaphorically, perhaps the same distanced connection to language allows the diasporic Iranian subject to re-imagine Persian and its place within hegemonies of gender, class, ethnicity, and culture within a national context so deeply informed by Persian and its literary practices. Like Akbar’s distance from the spoken word, the defamiliarization of the mother tongue in diasporic contexts can enable a deconstructive performance of national identities. By analyzing the deployment of Persian language and literature in English, this paper examines how the diasporic subject narrates his or her loss of language, and his or her re-vision and re-voicing of that language. Drawing on critical and theoretical concepts of translation and bilingualism, autobiographical meditations on the loss and reacquisition of Persian in Iranian-American memoirs, as well as fictional meditations on language—like Abdolah’s—this paper argues that diasporic references to the mother tongue in another language (English) point to an absence which can be read both as a locus of loss and as a space of possibility
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