CRITICAL THOUGHTS: ON POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR’S TEHRANGELES
Man in an Ayatollah Khomeini costume at a West Hollywood discotheque on a regularly scheduled “Persian Night” Halloween (Ron Kelley, 1989).
BY R.M.
Porochista Khakpour is an interesting case. I think she’s politically well-intentioned and clearly aware of the reactionary turn in the diaspora. She also has to be commended for speaking up on Palestine. Nonetheless, she’s still swimming in the same puddle that generated that reactionary turn – and a peddler of the same ideas.
The problem, fundamentally, is how amputated Iranian or Persian identity has become for those living outside Iran. The Iranian middle class (for reasons not really their fault) has inherited a very limited vision of Iranian identity. The diaspora, largely dominated by this middle class, has an even more attenuated understanding of Iranian culture. The diaspora in the US – even more so. By the time you reach the McMansions of the SoCal suburbs, what’s left of Iranian identity is a burnt appendage of a wider corpus. The entire universe of cultural practices across Iran has been amputated to white BMWs (!), non-Zoroastrians wearing Faravahars, dentists and realtors with shameless bus ads, and an ersatz vision of Iranian history that skips from the first four Achaemenid kings straight down to Reza the Cossack and his ill-fated son.
The reality of Iranian-ness extending beyond this shadow of a shadow is mostly lost on the diaspora and Khakpour – its literary enfant terrible. Of course, this is a symptom of a wider crisis. Although things are much better inside the country – Iranian-ness has taken a bad beating. The Islamic Republic is exclusively interested in fostering its own amputated vision of Iranian identity (though probably richer than what the diaspora offers). The other carrier of national culture, the Iranian elite, was also mostly wiped out in the second half of the 20th century. Ironically, Khakpour thinks she’s playing the progressive; shadowboxing the big bad Iranian elites of American suburbia. In reality, the culture she’s taking on is the culture of middle class arrivistes cosplaying what they half-remember from Farah’s arts initiatives. Only someone whose great-grandparents were born on the wrong side of the arbab-rayat divide could even conceive of pretending to be Italian. Just imagine the scene: a Farmanfarmaian or an Ayrumlu summering in Carlsbad with European aristocrats – and pretending they’re Italian!?
Khakpour doesn’t like this culture – and she broadly is aware that something went wrong. Unfortunately, the solution (some kind of return to Iran), is impossible for Khakpour. A common link through the two books of hers I’ve read, Sons and Tehrangeles, is an absolute terror of Iran. In her earlier Sons, the protagonist has a mental breakdown triggered by the prospect of visiting his homeland. The characters in Tehrangeles don’t even ever seriously consider the possibility – Iran has to come back to one of them on a bad ayahuasca trip.
This begs the question – why is Khakpour so concerned with Iranian identity? Iranian-ness isn’t a magical attribute floating in the ether. If you have no interest in being in Iran – then why the insistence on being Iranian? Khakpour’s novels, especially Sons, suggest that like many identities, Iranian-ness is imposed on diasporites by American racism. This may have been true for a few years after 9/11 but no longer holds. The great irony is that her character Roxi Milani in Tehrangeles gets it right: it’s remarkably easy for descendants of first-generation Iranian migrants to pass as white. Barring the potential for an awkward fifteen seconds at customs, no one cares that you’re Iranian!
American racism is the genocide of indigenous nations and the enslavement of Africans, not your primary school teacher mispronouncing your name. There’s a genre of Iranian-American progressive who can read about the history of Jim Crow laws and react with: “Yea! That’s just like when Jennifer from high school said ghormeh sabzi smells bad!”
Fundamentally, this is the problem with Khakpour’s diaspora works like Sons and Tehrangeles (and probably Brown Album, though that is speculation). It is intellectual reflection on a spectral and amorphous identity, a house of mirrors stretching seven-and-a-half thousand miles from Tehran to LA. For better or for worse, this diaspora identity is probably not long for this world. When even the Pahlavi daughters (whose tastes and aspirations probably don’t stray too far from the Milani sisters in Tehrangeles) can’t speak Persian – it is unlikely there will remain an “Iranian-American community” in a few decades.
