LET ME TELL YOU WHERE I’VE
BEEN: NEW WRITING BY WOMEN
OF THE IRANIAN DIASPORA, Edited
by Persis M. Karim.
University of
Arkansas Press, 201 Ozark Ave., Fayetteville,
AK 72701, in association with the
Iran Heritage Foundation, 2006, 349
pages, $24.95 cloth.
Persis Karim’s second anthology of
women writers who are at once Iranian
and Western showcases an explosion of
women’s voices in every genre, a byproduct
of Iran’s conservative Islamist
revolution. This outpouring is reflected
in best-seller lists both in Iran and abroad;
according to Majid Eslami, editor of the
literary journal Haft, women writers have
become the avant-garde of Persian literature.
Karim presents both accomplished and
emerging writers thematically rather than
imposing a conventional organization by
genre. Her intention that the pieces, section
by section, sing together and engage
in...literary conversation is fully realized
with this method.
In the first section, “Home Stories,”
women reprise America’s immigration
experience, quietly toting up the losses
with a new candor, weighing what has
been lost and what found when one’s own
homeland is no longer livable.
In her cross-genre prose piece, “Captions,” Layli Arbab Shirani limns this
complex loss: I grew up an Iranian, among
Iranians, eating Iranian food…but feeding
a Western intellect that has no memory, no
history, no knowledge of my suitcase.
Tara Barampour expresses this induced
schizophrenia in both poetry and memoir,
a new genre Karim tells us for womenof this bi-cultural phenomenon, born out
of the diaspora. In her poem “Portland,
Oregon 1979,” Barampour juxtaposes
images: Cousins dressed as sheep escaped /
on hands and knees over the Pakistani border
to avoid the war with her family’s new
neighborhood in a Portland cul-de-sac
where I worried most about my father / not
going to work / and my mother / not making
pies / or cleaning house much.
In an excerpt from her memoir To See
and See Again: A Life in Iran and America,
Barampour skewers the ur-immigrant
experience, when—in a return to her
family’s ancestral village—she encounters
two old women who place her in her family
saga through her father’s name. On her
return to America, she writes that it was
many years before I began to remember the
comfort that comes with owning, and being
owned by, a large affectionate clan.
While the sociology of immigration
names this amnesia as one of the sources
of American rootlessness, it is sobering
to re-experience these losses of identity
and memory through the vivid voices of
women who are experiencing the malady
for the first time. In fact, this anthology
is never more startling for the American
reader than when it gives us a look in the
mirror at what we have become.
Will younger feminists who may take
for granted their right to speak and be
heard, experience a shock of recognition
when reading Tara Fatemi’s poem“Women’s Duty?” (in the section of that
name)? Or does it take women who lived
through the fifties and sixties in this country
to appreciate how this poem faces a
woman’s complicity in her own silencing?
with needle and thread I sewed my lips
together
……………………………
months later I got too close
to the mirror…
…and screamed
to ears whose drums had closed
from lack of use.
A reader might ask: What value is there
in the shock of the looking glass when
this kind of repression is past in our culture?
In a time when our own elected
leaders are silenced in the face of the
current Bush regime, it serves us to remember
that institutionalized progressive
change is just as easily deinstitutionalized.
Niloofar Kalaam in her memoir-ish
essay “The Sun Is a Dying Star” anatomizes
that moment of change from progressive
to repressive and back again,
parodying the role our slight memories
play with an enduring metaphor: Of
course times change, histories change. And
what was a matter of life and death itself dies.
Becomes a parcel for memory to toss around
as it pleases.
In her essay “Becoming a Woman,”
Elham Gheytanchi tells of coming of age
as a woman in Tehran just as the revolution
was taking place. Do we rationalize
away that procrustean bed hardwired into
the adolescent experience across cultures?
Her life shrinks; his expands. He could
roar off on a motorcycle, shout at us with
his big voice;…running without fear, while
she resented the womanhood that cloistered
her and she struggled to define myself differently.
Are we confident our culture has
conquered this Everest of gender divides?
In two final thematic sections “Beyond” and “Tales Left Untold,” a reader is most
likely to find voices running clear, artists
who have so sublimated the wracking
experience of diaspora that we are
served it in works of yearning and longing,
the common tongue we all speak, of
life and love.
The experimental poet Katayoon
Zandvakili in “Stripes” writes of the process
of sustaining paradox that the poet
incubates. Here, two dissociated images
finally come together on a shore hitherto
indescribable, through the catalyst of the
poet’s mission of retrieval, a deep diving
exploration of the human psyche that
holds both shore and abyss in a creative
tension that can last decades before the
poem is born.
Similarly, HAALE, a poet known by
her singular name, digests a mother’s
abandonment in her poem “Green World
Through Broken Glass”:
……I
pictured her……
……on a beach
in daylight stopped by a seashell or by the
green world
through broken glass she decides to keep
clenched in her fist, letting it cut, on the
edge of the tide.
This anthology would not do justice to
its audience nor to its artists if the unspeakable
didn’t have a deserved place.
In that context it’s possible that Esther
Kamkar, included in both of Karim’s anthologies,
might hold the title Poetess of
the Unspeakable. I still wince to recall
Kamkar reading a poem at City Lights
Bookstore in San Francisco, celebrating
the release of this anthology, in which Kamkar eulogized her sister who didn’t die
in a post-revolutionary Taliban prison, but
whose essence perished.
Here, in “Words To Die For,” Kamkar
tells of a woman who visited her two
daughters in prison once a month for ten
years, taking them care packages / of birth
control pills. / She said: Their faces were yellow
like tumeric. / It was all in their eyes.
Let the editor have the last word on
what cannot be spoken. In her poem “Dawn on the Fall Equinox,” Persis Karim
compares an equinoctial dawn as it comes
to young men on the other side of the
world making war, to the dawn she experiences
lying beside her small son in bed.
How will I explain this to him?
In these hummed hours
before he speaks my name,
I pretend to have a truth
that turns the darkness into light.
by Destiny Kinal
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