This article
was first published in Zmag.org.
In a time of pending war
against Iran, after the catastrophic consequences of the US-led invasion of
Afghanistan and Iraq (with more than 655,000 deaths in Iraq alone), a
particularly lucrative industry of Iranian and Muslim women’s memoirs has
mushroomed in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities. These women’s
memoirs—perhaps
best represented by Azar Nafisi’s Reading
Lolita in Tehran (2003), and Roya Hakakian’s Journey to the Land of No (2005), with
their mutual roots in Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter
(1988)—have assumed center-stage in
appropriating the legitimate cause of women’s rights and placing it squarely in
the service of Empire building projects, disguised under the rhetoric of the
“war on terror.”
Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in
Revolutionary Iran
By Roya
Hakakian
As feminist scholars of
Iran and its Diaspora, we
suggest that these memoirs and their authors must be understood not only in
terms of the politics of reception in the United
States but also in terms of the U.S.
imperialistic project that is informed by the historical Euro-American colonial
discourses of civilization. At a time when the neo-colonial and imperialistic
projects seek to build a case for military attack or “regime change” in
Iran, we ask, how are these memoirs
complicit with these projects?
Reading
Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
By Azar
Nafisi
We identify
this memoir genre as a part of industries of knowledge-production that reinforce
and fuel the gendered and raced context of global capitalist
relations,
where the
binarized notions of “freedom” and “progress” in the “West” are juxtaposed to
“backwardness” and “barbarism” in Iran and in the rest of the Muslim
world. Identified as an authentic and authoritative site where the “silenced”
Iranian woman finally finds a voice with which to speak, these memoirs reproduce
reductive but familiar narratives which pin the constructed “Third-world woman”
against her male counterpart while setting the stage for what is presumed to be
her salvation.
In this
context, the patronizing language of women’s rights as human rights presumes and
actively constructs the category of the oppressed “traditional” Iranian woman,
often unaware of her own imprisonment by Islam and patriarchy. The “somber” woman, in this narrative,
must be trained to realize her rights as an individual, imagined as a “modern
woman” who embodies an idealized middle class norm of Euro-American consumption.
Once the
favored tale of “civilizing missions”, the contemporary rescue fantasy now has a
new twist. Rather than being spoken for by ambassadors of “civilization”,
Iranian women are able to speak for themselves courtesy of international
publishing houses. Women selected according to the resonance of their experience
within this narrative become the mouthpiece for the “authentic” Iranian
experience, making the current construction of the “rescue fantasy” more
insidious than ever.
These memoirs have proved widely
popular in the mass market, while the mainstream media legitimizes their authors
as “Iran experts” and
“women’s rights activists,” thus ignoring the well-informed and critical Iranian
feminist scholarship in Iran and its Diaspora. In fact, we are not the first to challenge the
construction and mobilization of gendered “victims” in furthering imperialistic
projects. We
draw from a rich body of feminist scholarship such as those of Roxana
Bahramitash, Inderpal Grewal, bell hooks, Minoo Moallem, Negar Mottahedeh, Ella
Shohat, and Gayatri Spivak to call for a
critical analysis of women’s participation in these industries and question the
taken-for-granted notions of civilization, terror, freedom, democracy, and
fundamentalism. We ask why this
critical scholarship is ignored, while others have been tokenized and granted
generous media coverage?
As an
example, we call attention to the way that Hamid Dabashi’s astute critique of the
memoir genre, “Native Informers and
the Making of the American Empire” (al-Ahram, 1 - 7 June 2006, Issue No.
797), was maliciously attacked and his arguments deliberately distorted by North
American neoconservative outlets as an assault on Iranian women’s struggle for
autonomy, freedom and democracy. That Dabashi’s critique was singled out while
the works of women feminist scholars were ignored is a telling example of the
sexist assumptions and essentialist gender and racial binaries that underpin the
genre’s popularity. Assuming a monolithic category of “woman,” such binaries
grant authenticity of voice to certain women such as Azar Nafisi, who are
assumed to represent all “Iranian women,” while denying legitimacy to Hamid
Dabashi, who becomes the ideal type of the “misogynistic Middle Eastern man.”
Furthermore,
by dividing the world into binaries of East and West and assuming an inherent
notion of Iranian-ness, both the promoters of this genre and nationalist elites
tokenize certain Iranian writers and make them the representatives of a
homogenously imagined Iranian people and culture.
We deplore the
marginalization of critical engagements with this genre and declare that the
version of the romanticized and Orientalist portrayal of Iranian history and
women’s struggle depicted in the recent memoir industry is not only a gross
distortion and undermining of Iranian women’s active participation in political
and cultural spheres, but it also deliberately represses working class and rural
women’s hardships, hopes, desires, and aspirations.
In today’s Iran, women are
at the forefront of literacy, educational, artistic, journalistic, and legal
advancements. In a social,
literary, and political tradition of resistance that extends from generations of
peasant and working class women down to Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayn, Shirin Ebadi,
Shams Kasma’i, and Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian women continue to struggle for
their dignity and civil rights. Iranian women took two monarchic dynasties to
task and they now hold the Islamic Republic responsible to address their
demands. Any military or economic
sanctions against Iran will only set Iranian women back in their achievements,
and cause nothing but hardship and tragedy (as disastrously evident in Iraq
today).
We are firm believers that
historically, any militarist mobilizations, nationalist or imperial have been to
the detriment of Iranian women’s lives and their struggles against misogynistic
laws as well as their aspirations for welfare and democracy. We
object to militarism
imposed by “local” and diasporic nationalists, religious or secular
fundamentalists, or neo-colonialists and imperialists. We consider any bullet fired at the
direction of Iran, or any other country, targeted
against the historical struggle for freedom, equality, dignity, and democracy.
Niki
Akhavan, University
of California at Santa Cruz, USA
Golbarg
Bashi, Bristol
University, UK
Mana
Kia, Harvard
University, USA
Sima
Shakhsari, Stanford
University, USA
... Payvand News - 2/1/07 ... --
