A FETISHISTIC REUNION WITH THE OTHER: CRITICAL CONVERSATIONS WITHIN DIASPORA DISCOURSE
INTERVIEW WITH R.M.
What do you think of Porochista Khakpour’s reaction to your review of her book Tehrangeles?
Novelists are public intellectuals – they play an important role in the development of public reasoning in any polity. Critique (and counter-critiques!) are parts of that process. So, Khakpour’s reaction to a review, treating it as a kind of personal attack beyond the pale, is disappointing.
This is a bit surprising – I think Khakpour is overlooking that we likely overlap in our perspectives on many issues. So let’s be more explicit: the Iranian diaspora is being mobilized in a dangerous direction. It forms an increasingly important base for reactionary politics across North America – motivated by destructive nihilism towards Iran and regressive economic motivations (look at the outsized role of Iranian diasporites in grifts like crypto and AI). As a viral essay from a couple years ago points out, the diaspora’s influence on Iranians inside Iran is also increasingly negative. Despite being opposed to this trend, Khakpour, and other progressive Iranian-American novelists, fail to threaten this new vision of Iranian-ness.
How do you navigate the balance between critiquing the work itself and the broader cultural or identity-based narratives it engages with?
I think the previous review tends towards the latter. Clearly, something is going deeply wrong with Iranian identity in the diaspora. One response is to litigate this and push back by offering a different vision. A part of this can be to zoom out and ask, generally, what the purpose and function of this identity is. Can you even be Iranian outside Iran? What does that mean? Are you sure you’re Iranian? Are you certain you’re not an American who wants to feel special?
Fundamentally, for those who grew up in the West – you don’t have to be Iranian. Progressive diasporites love to clown on first-generation Iranian immigrants and their obsession with being seen as ‘vite.’ There is a new book or paper out almost every year on the racial paradoxes of being Iranian in America; half-convincingly ticking off white on the census. Progressive diasporites clearly prefer ‘Iranian-ness’ as part of the racialized POC spectrum. Recall the viral meme from the peak of BLM protests in 2020, phonetically writing out “azizam, you are not white” in Persian.
But this isn’t an obvious or predestined outcome. Second-generation and third-generation diasporites are on the fast-track to a vague ‘white ethnic’ status, something akin to the process that Jewish and Italian exiles underwent the last century (Tehrangeles is actually most interesting when it explores this dynamic).
In other words, the external environment isn’t necessarily imposing Iranian-ness on diasporites who grew up in the West. This is especially true for those outside of Iranian hubs like LA’s Westwood, Vancouver’s North Shore, or Toronto’s Richmond Hill. So the decision to write as an Iranian, or to incorporate that identity into your writing, is a voluntary one. I think it’s worth interrogating the political logic behind that decision. Does it stem from a progressive impulse? Does it have progressive implications?
Would you consider your intent to contest the “authenticity” of Khakpour’s, and other writers’, Iranian identities?
I’m contesting the Iranian identity of the diaspora as a whole – not just Khakpour. The first step of the analysis is to interrogate the decision to voluntarily adopt this identity. Undoubtedly, there are wider commercial incentives to deploy identity in a certain way. The second step is to consider the specific vision of Iranian-ness that is being promulgated.
What do you make of the argument that some diaspora works are shaped by external pressures to “perform” identity for a Western gaze?
In a book review from a few years ago, Azadeh Moaveni has this great line about how Iranian literature gets grouped with “world literature – which commands a loyal readership fond of djinns and turbaned villains.” A parallel commercial incentive dynamic exists for diaspora literature. It’s natural and fine that identity is weaponized for instrumental purposes – but it’s also fine if the wider audience or community contests the ways this is done. Ultimately, being Iranian is a great hook for getting into art school, or obtaining a grant, or getting a novel published. In the literary and artistic sphere, identity is an effective method for product differentiation.
Is this critique applicable to other novelists?
Khakpour is especially salient because of how the flatness of Iranian identity in Sons and Tehrangeles contrasts with her otherwise substantive positive and progressive vision for Iranian identity. But I’ll also mention Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, which I read recently. It is brilliant but naturally works best as an American book. Its Iranian elements feel contrived – as if they were cribbed from Wikipedia. Even the driving disaster of the novel, the 1988 shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by the US Navy, feels like an American’s best-guess as to the closest equivalent to Iran’s 9/11.
Unlike Khakpour, Akbar also dips dangerously into a set of images and discourses about life in the Islamic Republic, which (despite the concept’s overuse and misuse) can only be labelled orientalist. Martyr!’s narration of the Iran-Iraq War borrows liberally from the standard pantheon: Iranian teenagers wearing plastic keys to heaven (this never happened) running across minefields. This is all somewhat orthogonal to the point of Martyr! – but Akbar falls into the trap of treating one side of the Iranian polity as mindless orcs. This probably wasn’t his intent. I think he wanted to partially set his story in Iran and due to his unfamiliarity with the country, ended up inadvertently adopting the perspective of a set of diaspora writers with a more pointed and partisan liberal-imperialist viewpoint towards Iran.
Just as a side note, Flight 655 has largely lost its former cultural and political salience inside the country. I happened to come across one of the few public commemorations of it in Tehran while reading Martyr! Appropriately, it was inside the Iran-Iraq War Museum.
What are the implications of this line of critique? Would you say that a writer can’t narrative stories inside Iran if they are not Iranian?
Of course they can. There’s a sub-genre of (self-described) progressive identity politics which demands lived experience – but that is obviously wrong. The issue is that Akbar and Martyr!’s claim to Iranian-ness triggers a different type of analysis and a different set of conversations than novels by non-Iranian writers.
Unlike Khakpour, Kaveh Akbar is arguably less active as a specifically Iranian writer. Do you think a critique from this angle is fair-game?
Kaveh Akbar may not be a WASP but rationally, he is clearly by any definition conventionally American. We have to be a little rigorous in identifying the actual extent to which the post-9/11 moment purged Middle-Easterners from ‘American-ness’ and the extent to which it is an identitarian self-exile by a certain sub-temperament of progressive Americans with certain ethnic backgrounds. Of course, he is fully entitled to subjectively feel liminal; to self-identify as someone who isn’t really fully American – because of this abstract Iranian background.
But literature, more so than painting or sculpture but less than cinema, is prescriptive. His subjective interpretation and beliefs on Iranian identity create and reinforce wider perceptions in society. The book’s shallow perspective on Iran therefore forms too hollow of a foundation for a vision of diasporic identity. Granted, Akbar isn’t trying to a write a My Uncle Napoleon or Savashun; something hoviyat-sāz (instructing identity) which distills and defines the zeitgeist for a particular national community in a particular historical moment. But in a moment of crisis for Iranians outside Iran, it is worthwhile to intervene and point out the failures of popular art in this respect.
These aren’t specific shortcomings by Khakpour or Akbar, but general contradictions among Iranians living in the West. We fall into the trap of treating ‘diaspora’ as a totally natural and organic category. We used to be Iranians inside Iran – and now we’re Iranians in diaspora. We regard the existence and sustainability of this concept as self-evident. This confidence likely stems from our interaction and overlap with the two most robust diasporas: the Jewish and Armenian. But this overlooks the incredibly rigorous set of institutions underlying those communities —physical churches and temples as vectors for repeating interactions, massive cultural, philanthropic, and educational institutions, and even political organizations like the Dashnaks. Our confidence that an Iranian diaspora identity can exist in the absence of these institutions is puzzling.
Is identity based on the specific physical context you live in? The people you repeatedly interact with in real life? Or does it have to do with some ethereal essence? If you live in NY or LA and have a job and lifestyle identical to your neighbors – but like to eat at Masquerade or sip natural wine at Voodoo Vin and listen to Googoosh, does that magically change the essence of who you are? Does it make you a member of a different nation? This is a leading way of asking the question but books like Tehrangeles and Martyr! functionally answer ‘Yes.’ (1)*
At its best, Martyr! is aware of this paradox of diaspora identity. Akbar conveys the entire gist of my critique in a single paragraph:
“I’ve read your poems, Cyrus. I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s a part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones? Do you see what I mean?”
What are the intellectual stakes in this intervention?
This isn’t even an obviously important issue, were it not for the ways in which diasporites hold Iranians intellectually captive. Iran is experiencing an existential polycrisis, and has been for some time. The political and intellectual legitimacy of the current system is at a historic low. In the void, the vision of Iran and Iranian-ness being built in the diaspora becomes profoundly important. While the diaspora may usually lie culturally downstream from the homeland; these polarities can switch when the homeland is experiencing social breakdown. Therefore, it is critical that progressive intellectuals put forth their own vision. We can be certain that those in our community who celebrate war and destruction will not fail to do advance their own particular vision. This is a tall order and maybe unfair to ask of writers like Khakpour and Akbar – but it is fair to push back against visions of Iranian-ness that fall dangerously close to Maz Jobrani and Max Amini crowd-work.
But I hope that these critiques are considered as nudges – not as final judgments.
* (1) Some of Khakpour’s fans/friends had dumb reactions to last review; which is fine. I would also be a shooter if someone negatively reviewed a friend’s book. But one in particularly irked me; calling my interpretation of Iranian diasporic identity ‘essentialist.’ I think they flipped through the thesaurus in the wrong direction. ‘Reductive’ would be a fair label, but the point of that (and this) is to suggest the opposite of an essentialist interpretation of identity.
