Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita In Tehran, Fatemeh Keshavarz (365 Books, Day 229)

[rushthatspeaks]

Borrowed from rax.

This short but incisive book is a critique of what Keshavarz calls the New Orientalism, as exemplified by Reading Lolita in Tehran: a set of narratives, purporting to be factual, by people who at least theoretically have inside knowledge of a culture due to upbringing or heredity, which use this insider status to reinscribe a stereotypical and two-dimensional view of the culture in question. Older Orientalist works tend to be the views of outsiders-- traveler's tales, exoticism and sensationalism for an audience presumed to have no familiarity with the region described. In a world connected by air travel and the internet, the audience cannot be assumed to have less familiarity with any given place than any given traveler-- but the audience can still be assumed to have less familiarity than a person who was born in that place and raised in that culture.

New Orientalist works can be very popular and very insidious, because they sound to a Western audience as though a person who ought to know is saying 'everything you surmised is true', whereas in fact they have significant blind spots and often genuine factual inaccuracies about the cultures they are describing. Part of Keshavarz' project, in this book, is to illustrate facets of Iranian culture that do not fit the vision that most Westerners have built from the media and popular memoirs.

Keshavarz describes the multiplicity and variance of Persian literature, with particular attention to the writings of women in the twentieth century, especially bestselling poets and novelists. She contrasts this with the idolization of Western literary figures the female lit students have in Reading Lolita in Tehran, mentioning a sequence in which one of the students secretly names her daughter Daisy after Daisy Miller because Daisy Miller is the first woman she's had to look up to in literature. Keshavarz points out that as a child, she herself looked up to Shirin, the lover, queen, and educator from the twelfth-century romantic epic Shirin and Khusrau. She describes the stunned grief of her entire high school class at the news of the early death of the poet Forrough Farrokhzad, a woman whose life and work were intimately familiar to every girl there, and points out that this kind of loving engagement by a large public with modern poetry pokes a serious hole in one of the main Orientalizing myths: the idea that, say, Iran has produced great works of art and culture, but that that was long ago in a glorious past, which is completely removed from the present and can never come again.

Keshavarz also attacks the Western critical myth that the novel never became a major form in Middle Eastern countries by offering a close reading of Shahrnoush Parsipur's Women Without Men (1989), a post-revolutionary and very popular work of feminist magical realism that I have to go out and read immediately.

And she goes through Reading Lolita in Tehran with a steady hand, pointing out inaccuracies, biases, rhetorical devices, emphases, hidden priorities-- it's one of the better takedowns of a book I've seen in a very long time. The ignorance of Iranian literature she proves would alone be stunning, but she also describes serious problems with the book's explanations of theology, and demonstrates via quotation that everything in the book associated with America has positive adjectives, and everything associated with genuine Islamic faith negative ones. I find her argument entirely convincing. In addition, she mentions several other works that she suggests are also part of the New Orientalist narrative, such as The Kite Runner, and hopes that other critics will go into detail about the differing ways various works fall into this pattern.

Jasmine and Stars has given me a significant list of Iranian writers, painters, filmmakers, and theologians from the post-revolutionary period to look up, and it's also provided a quite useful critical framework. Keshavarz speaks of the New Orientalism in the context of Islam, of course, but I think that either that term needs to stretch to cover work about other cultures or we need an exact equivalent. (If there is one, someone tell me! The Keshavarz is from 2007 but is still most of what I get when I Google the term; but I do not claim to be as up on theory as I might.)

Because, you remember that book by Amy Chua I reviewed the other day, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? If that's not a New Orientalist text, nothing is. That's a person claiming to have insider knowledge about a culture using that supposed insider knowledge to reinforce hegemonic discourse, and the fact that it's about parenting rather than about an actual country obscures this a little, but the basic pattern is there, including the fact that both Chua and the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi, are writing from an internalization of the hegemonic discourse because it is what they use to regulate their own experiences, rather than having a consciously stereotype-reinforcing agenda. Of course these books are bestsellers: they combine the appearance of presumptive authority with the reassurance of preaching to the choir.

But, as Keshavarz so beautifully explains, they're bad for you. Because, and this is starting to become my personal motto both for writing and for life in general, things are always more complex than that. Hearing the same myths over and over will not help anyone really develop empathy for people from other cultures.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

use this insider status to reinscribe a stereotypical and two-dimensional view of the culture in question

Yes yes yes. Thank you.

[rushthatspeaks]

You are welcome. I needed this way of looking things so much, and I'm really happy with Keshavarz' book.

[ithiliana]

Brilliant!

Thank you!

I've not read LiT, although several colleagues loved it, were teaching it, and encouraging me to do so (especially one who does memoir).

I tried--but was put off it for reasons I could not articulate.

I definitely want to read Keshavarz's work!

[rushthatspeaks]

You should read her! I am going to track down her book on Rumi because it has the potential of being a book in English on Rumi that doesn't suck!

[dorothean]

I haven't read Reading Lolita in Tehran, but I have read The Kite Runner, and -- yeah.

Thanks for that term, "New Orientalism." I hadn't know it before but now I'm busy thinking of books I've read that this applies to: everything by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Albert Memmi's Decolonization and the Decolonized, which is his extremely disappointing, 50-years-later follow-up to The Colonizer and the Colonized.

[rushthatspeaks]

People keep telling me to read The Kite Runner and I might but I keep sort of looking at it askance.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is exactly who I was thinking of while reading this, which is kind of eerie because her stuff came out after Keshavarz.

[jhameia]

Thanks for this review! It's a great term, indeed... I've been looking for a name for what I suspect I've done in the past and am watching out for in my own writing, and your review provided that!

[oyceter]

Read this review, liked it, and completely forgot to comment. Or: Amy Tan, I still have issues with you!!

Thanks for the rec, and I'll definitely be looking for this one.

[yasaman]

I haven't had a chance to read this book in its entirety, but I find Keshavarz's concept of "New Orientalism" to be enormously helpful and relevant to books like Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Though I will say, having touched on the issue of New Orientalism and Khaled Hosseini's books in a paper once, I think there's more going on in his works than just a certain amount of unfortunate New Orientalism. I'd be curious to know your thoughts if you end up reading Hosseini. Speaking for myself, and as an Afghan with a family from a similar ethnic and class background as Hosseini's, I see Hosseini's books as him airing his conflicting feelings about Afghanistan. The Kite Runner reads to me very much like Hosseini giving in to despair about Afghanistan. The whole book is about an exile dealing with his issues with his home country, and Hosseini's own issues come through rather transparently for me. A Thousand Splendid Suns suggests that he's found hope in Afghanistan again, even if it's a very bittersweet hope.

Also, I don't know if Keshavarz addresses this or not, but I think New Orientalism might be a somewhat lacking framework for Afghan writers at least, because issues of class and ethnic differences can loom so very large. Like, you can see Hosseini's portrayal of Hazaras as New Orientalist, or you can view it in the context of decades worth of ethnic conflict and oppression in Afghanistan, which Hosseini rather ham-handedly tries to be "PC" about by making his Hazara characters saintly.

Ack, sorry for all the tl;dr, obviously I am missing my Persian lit classes!

[q10.livejournal.com]

this is a fascinating and thoughtful discussion of a book i haven't read about another book i haven't read.

all i can think reading it, though, is that it's terribly unfair that there's a book, written from an Iranian perspective, concerned in large part with critiquing ‘reading “Lolita” in Tehran’, and this book is not called ‘reading “reading ‘Lolita’ in Tehran” in Tehran’. i realize that Keshavarz is based out of St. Louis, and so can't be blamed for failing to use this title, but it still seems like a cosmic injustice of some sort.

[navrins]

And this review should then be called "Reading 'Reading Reading 'Lolita' in Tehran in St. Louis' in Texas"?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Well, actually "Reading 'Reading Reading 'Lolita' in Tehran in St. Louis' in a basement in Indiana", this weekend, but your point is valid.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I agree with this comment.

[earis.livejournal.com]

Ah. So, I read The Kite Runner on the recommendation of an intelligent individual and there was something really, really off about it, which I could never express. I think the phenomenon investigated here, the New Orientalism, may be part of why I found the book lacking (although to be honest, the prose is also part of it). I think Jasmine and Stars may be a book for me to read. Thank you.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You should! It will give you a whole huge list of other things you also want to read!

[almostblue.livejournal.com]

This is a great review.

Have you read Colonialism's Culture, by Nicholas Thomas? It sounds like a similar post-colonialist critique, only in his case he spends a fair amount of time applying it to the American West and the enduring myths we attached to Native American culture, as well as dealing with broader legacy of colonialism and the global south more generally.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I have not read the Nicholas Thomas and it sounds right up my alley; I will look that up.

[almostblue.livejournal.com]

Even if you don't review it, let me know what you think. I had to read it in a class I took on post-colonialism for my master's degree; it's heavy on the critical theory in some sections, but I ended up really enjoying most of it, even if I didn't always agree with his points.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Shahrnoush Parsipur's Women Without Men (1989), a post-revolutionary and very popular work of feminist magical realism that I have to go out and read immediately.

It's on the shelf. You will not be disappointed.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I had an American friend of Irish and Lebanese ancestry and in the seventies she did the hippy overland to India thing, and ended up spending a long time in Afghanistan. She said she connected to this whole women's culture there, where they had women's bathhouses and women met in them and talked about everything and especially modern 1970s women's poetry in Arabic, of which there was a whole thriving culture. And they were wearing burqas in the street and naked in the baths, and they had this whole alternative underground culture that my friend found very appealing. She spoke Arabic, and she was a nurse, and she worked there for a year or so. She'd left before the Soviet invasion. But she talked about it, in Greece in the early eighties, as this complex feminine culture that wasn't exactly feminist but wasn't exactly not either, and which contrasted a lot with the way women live in Greece, and for that matter in the US and Britain too. She said there were drawings and poems pinned up in the bath-houses, where men never went, and passionate discussion. And she had read all kinds of things because they'd been recommended to her and lent to her.

I've often thought about that culture, because it's so invisible that I've never otherwise heard anything about it,

I know Iran isn't Afghanistan and Farsi isn't Arabic, but this seemed relevant even so.

[q10.livejournal.com]

Arabic isn't one of the major spoken languages of Afghanistan, at least according to a couple minutes of poking around Wikipedia and the CIA world factbook. (But maybe this was different in the cities in the 70s?)

This doesn't in any way contradict the claim that there was a rich undergroudn Arabic literature scene there at one point, of course. (Although it does make the Arabic:Farsi comparison in the last sentence a little weird, since Arabic doesn't really relate to Afghanistan the way Farsi relates to Iran - it appears that in both places, Arabic is an extreme minority spoken language with a great deal of religious and cultural significance.)

Do you know any more about this at all? I'm curious about the sociolinguistics of the situation you're describing, and would love to have more to go on if I at some point get around to looking into it.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think Arabic was the language she had in common with them -- I don't know what their first language was. I don't even know if the poetry and art she talked about were all in Arabic or partly in Arabic (I know part of it was because she was given and recommended books) and partly in the vernacular. This is something I heard about from her some years after and at a time when she couldn't go back and was feeling nostalgic.

I don't know much more about it I'm afraid. It's one of those things that has stuck in my mind for decades now because it's so much not the way you expect, but this is my memory of my friend's anecdotes.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That is fascinating. I have never heard anything about that culture either and am now wondering if there is any English-language material about it (that doesn't suck). I will look into it and let you know if I come across anything.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is so useful. I'm on a panel about Non-Western Fantasy for Minicon, and one of the subtopics is supposed to be "what are some of the pitfalls?" And I was looking at a few of the books I've read in that category and labeled one of the pitfalls "self-exoticizing." That is now looking to me like a subset of this larger problem, and having the other terminology to look into and comparisons to make will be very helpful indeed. Thank you.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Glad to be useful! It was a really useful book for me.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You should read it, and then you will spend a whole lot of time going 'oh hell the following list of things are not available in translation MAYBE I SHOULD JUST LEARN PERSIAN'.

... I have my own ideas of fun.

[roselet.livejournal.com]

This is a fascinating review, and I can't wait to read the book. I work in a library supplying books to schools, and I've noticed a couple of the other librarians love (and recommend) a lot of New Orientalist texts - most of them ending with a glorious escape to the US, or something similar. I have always felt uncomfortable reading them, and reading this review has connected the dots for me. I shall go and hunt out Jasmine and Starts!

[roselet.livejournal.com]

Stars, rather.

[roselet.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was just searching for Jasmine and Stars online and I came across this review, which I found interesting.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Okay, so that review? ... not so much, no. I don't want to at this particular moment write a giant list of reasons why it is wrong, although I can do that if you think it needs a point-by-point refutation, but I think I can sum up the problem with it in one point:

I was raised Baha'i, in the American Baha'i community, which has in it many, many Iranian Baha'is in exile. This reviewer complains that Keshavarz calls the Baha'is a 'community' and not a 'faith', which is taken as a point against Keshavarz.

The Baha'i community is in fact what people who belong to it call it. If you're talking about it in the context of world religions generally, you can call the religion the Baha'i Faith, but when you are referring to individual groups of Baha'is you call them the Baha'i community of x area because 'the Baha'i Faith' refers to the worldwide body and worldwide religious framework. So Keshavarz has the terminology right, and this reviewer has made the exact kind of factual error that Keshavarz is yelling at the New Orientalists for perpetrating all the damn time.

I don't know as much about the context of the rest of that review, though there are some other things I could go into, but that really jumped out at me.

Also WTF Orientalism is totally an established critical framework I do not even see how that is debatable at this late date aargh.

Anyhow: yes, interesting review. Strongly disagree.

[roselet.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. I was interested to see what your response was, as I don't feel I know enough about the subject (or the book!) to comment. (Except that Orientalism is obviously established! Having studied Orientalist art at university I would be extremely surprised to learn that it isn't real.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It is quite awesome. I have read several of the Glorious Escape To The U.S. books myself and they have become kind of aggravating; it made a good antidote.

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

Why aggravating?

(some of my relatives survived by escaping to US. Some died because they could not escape. I want to know what I should be silent in English, as not to aggravate the natives. Because I want to fit in, to be like everyone and not aggravate)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It's not the actual content of the books, it's the way they talk about it-- a lot of these books say basically 'the place I come from is the worst place in the world and the U.S. is Best and has no problems', and of course the U.S. has problems. Everywhere has problems. No place is perfect. People in the U.S. I think shouldn't hear that it's perfect all the time, because it makes it less likely that the problems here will be solved instead of totally ignored. It is completely likely that the U.S. is better for a lot of people who have moved to it than the places they came from, but 'better' and 'perfect' are not the same thing.