>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
>> Joan Weeks: good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.
On behalf of all my colleagues, and particular Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb,
who is Chief of the African and Middle East Division I'd
like to welcome everyone.
I'm Joan Weeks, I'm head of the Near East Section,
the sponsor of today's program.
And we're very pleased to present this titled Us and Them,
breaking free from cultural branding and identity politics.
Before we start today's program and introduce our speaker I'd
like to give you a little bit of an overview about our collections,
in the hopes that you'll come back and use them.
The speaker today is writing about Iranian Americans.
And I did a quick search in our catalogue
and found 43 books on that topic.
And some of them are in Persian and some of them are in English;
so you're welcome to come back into our reading room
and please use our collections
for your future enjoyment and for the research.
We are a custodial division and we build collections and serve these
to researchers from around the globe.
We cover over 78 countries and more than two dozen languages.
The Africa section includes all the countries of Sub-Sahara Africa.
And we're going to have a follow on program to this, so please stay
if you can to hear our program on the conversations with Africa Poets
that will immediately follow this program.
And we also have the Hebraic section that covers Judaica
and Hebraic worldwide and our Near East section covers all
of the Arab countries, including North African, Turkey,
Turkic Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan and the Muslims
in Western China, Russia and the Balkans.
So, it's a very extensive research collection area
and just a few housekeeping items before we get started.
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And also we have fliers available if you're interested in our blog
or Facebook, if you subscribe to the Facebook you'll hear
about other future programs as well.
So, without further ado though I'd
like to invite my colleague Hirad Dinavari
who is our Persian specialist, to introduce our speaker.
Thank you.
>> Hirad Dinavari: Thank you everyone for coming
on difficult traffic day from what I hear.
It's wonderful to have our speaker here today;
this would be her second book that she would be covering at LC.
We love her so much with the first book that we've invited her
for her new book, which is a very timely book on immigrants living
over you know, in different countries essentially.
I will do a short bio, although she really doesn't need a bio,
she's well known.
Ms. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani grew up in Uganda,
was educated in the United Kingdom and then
in the United States, and now lives in France.
She is author of the Women who Read Too Much, which was a book
on the poetess and woman leader if you
like Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn 19th century icon,
also she's written The Saddlebag.
Her novels have been published in French, Italian, Spanish, German,
Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Russian, Korean and Chinese.
And I hope to this Persian and Arabic soon will be added as well.
A nice quote from one of her books is "We abandon our true homeland
when we cannot identify with others".
I think that captures the essence of this talk and instead
of me blabbing on; I would love to have Bahiyyih herself entice you
with her wonderful wisdom and her welcome.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: It would have been fun to hear him blabbing
on rather than me blabbing on.
But I would first like to begin with all my gratitude to Mary-Jane Deeb,
to the Near Eastern Section, African and Middle Eastern Division
of the Library of Congress, to Joan Weeks for her kind introduction
and above all to dear Hirad for his generosity
in maintaining correspondence with me,
all through this last couple of years.
I've been delighted to hear from him.
I've given the title of Breaking Free From Cultural Branding.
Because of something which happened last year in Britain
and you have had your elections here
and this is certainly not a political discussion,
but it affected me deeply when I heard Teresa May saying
in October last year that citizens
of the world were citizens of nowhere.
And it really struck me because she was speaking
about a very particular elite who are well represented in capitals
like Washington with the international institutions.
I live in Strasburg where there are all also international elite
if you like in Europe.
And there is a kind of gap between such people and the ordinary people
in the street, that is certainly the case.
But I was thinking of all the billions of people
who are not international elite, who also find themselves
as citizens of the world.
And to be told that you're a citizen of nowhere when you are a refugee,
when you have gone through heroin conditions of war, of famine,
of deprivation and finally find yourselves stripped
of everything seemed to me to be the last gesture of ravage.
It didn't seem fair.
So, it occurred to me that one of the reasons why we're so worried
about being labeled one way or another is because we are looking
for labels and maybe people think that to be called a citizen
of the world is a threat; so we try to undermine it.
Because of the rise of nationalism that we see in the world today,
because of the extremes and phobia, perhaps like in a previous age
where anyone who seemed to be cosmopolitan,
the word cosmopolitan became a slur in the 1930's.
Cosmopolitanism became something like globalism
and it was considered a threat to the nationalism of the times.
I thought maybe we could look at the real meaning behind a citizen
of the world and see it as an inclusive kind of identity,
see it as a way of bringing people together rather
than imposing wars between them.
Citizens of the world and those of us
that don't necessarily carry one name label, that have a brand
which seems to be multiple, very often find ourselves sort
of without a singular identity.
And it seems that part of the reason I needed to write this book was
because of the fracturing of identity that I've noticed
in the Iranian diasporic community.
We're not just one group of people, we're multiple.
We seem to have identities that also reflect the cultures
and the countries from which, in which we find new homes.
So, I've set this story in a kind of ping pong world
between the French Iranian World and the American Iranian World.
And I follow the life of the old lady who has emerged from Iran,
almost by accident really, not by desire.
She had wanted to stay in her country which I think is the case
for most refugees and migrants.
It isn't an act necessarily of choice.
And she finds herself rather
like a benign King Lear bouncing between two daughters.
Now my two daughters are certainly nothing like Goneril and Regan.
They have every reason, and maybe Goneril and Regan did too,
for having chips on their shoulders.
But, we see their lives through the lives of the old lady.
We see her through their eyes; so we're given a chance to look
at the Iranian coming from Iran, from the point of view
of the diasperin Iranian.
And we looked at the Diasperin daughters from the point
of view of the Iranian mother.
Every since I started writing,
people have called me an Iranian writer.
And I don't see how I could possibly be called an Iranian writer
if I grew up in East African.
I don't see how I can also be called an Iranian writer if I'm not living
in Iran talking about Iran today.
I've written about Iran in the 19th century,
which is not what Iran is now.
And so I realized I had to write a story about what I knew,
which was the experience of being outside Iran.
And not only outside from one perspective, but since I've lived
in several countries myself
and since I've met the Iranian Diaspera all over the place I wanted
to capture something of that diversity, that fragmentation.
The title, the cover of this book is interesting
because it reflects broken glass.
It reflects fractured glass; it reflects prisms of mirror or glass.
They're not just giving you one image,
but are giving you different facets of the image and of the light.
And I'm particularly pleased with the cover
because of an interesting quote that I discovered by James Joyce.
As you know he had difficulty publishing Ulysses
but he also had difficulty publishing Dubliners.
And it took him something like nine years before the book came out.
And in the process, in his frustration he wrote the following,
now I've lost it, one second.
Here we are.
He wrote to his publisher saying "I seriously believe
that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland
by preventing the Irish people from having a good look at themselves
in my nicely polished looking glass".
Now looking glass and mirrors are something
that Iranians absolutely love, you can't go to an Iranian house
without seeing reflections of yourself
and everybody else on all sides.
But I think particularly fragmented glass is something very intimately
associated with Iranian culture.
They have a way of making the most remarkable mosaics
out of pieces of broken mirror.
And I've often wondered whether they first have to break the mirror
in order to make the mosaic, or whether there's
so much shattered class all over the place
that they have found creative ways of using it.
But in any event broken mirrors, fractured mirrors,
balls of broken glass reflecting refracted rays of light is a met
of very close to the Iranian psyche I thought.
And since I have no pretentions of writing a book
that could retard the course of civilization if it was not read
by the Iranians, I thought it best
to present a fractured vision of this community.
I've done it in several ways.
One is because it's simply the subject matter is fractured.
It's about a scattering of people all over the world.
But I've also chosen a narrative structure
which is reflecting that fragmentation.
So, you will find in this story the threat of the lives of the mother
and her two daughters, the King Lear threat, which I vaguely described.
The story of the mother going from one country
to the other meeting the French daughter,
meeting the American daughter and her own experiences in between.
And between the chapters which tell you the story of BB John
and her daughter LiLi in Frane and her daughter Goli in America
and her yearning and aching heart for her absent son
who disappeared during the Iran/Iraq War as a young boy of 14
with the Keys of Paradise around his neck, Ali who has never been found,
who has never been confirmed dead or alive.
And who hovers all the way through this story as a sort
of yearned for Messiah figure.
A kind of promised, who may or may not ever come.
He's dangling in the story all the way through; so BiBi, Goli, Deli --
oh Sorry, LiLi -- sorry I'll say it again.
BiBi the mother, LiLi the French daughter,
Goli the American daughter.
Goli's daughter, Deli because the Persians absolutely love ending
names in the family either with the same vowel or starting them
with the same set of consonants.
And Ali who is the absent son.
Between the chapters that tell you the story
of this somewhat dysfunctional family, I have fragmented images
of Persians from all over the world.
So, you go in and out of the story by meeting fragments
of other Iranians in different countries all over the planet.
And I explain why I've done
that in the first chapter, which is called "Us".
In this chapter, I define the meaning
of that first personal plural narration.
Who is the us that is taking us into these different chapters?
And I start off by saying that we, we're waiting for this book
to come out for quite some time.
And it doesn't come out.
We keep waiting for it, we keep looking for it, it doesn't come out.
Who is going to write it?
Well whoever, it is that writes it has to do
so in the first person plural.
The first person plural is mandatory in such situations.
We use this point of view in Persian to show our modesty,
to demonstrate our humility.
At times it has to be admitted we also use it to evade responsibility,
but that's another issue.
And I wanted to clarify that so
that you wouldn't think the we, was a royal we.
And you wouldn't imagine that it was an editorial we.
This is a very specifically Iranian we and we use the word "Mahi"
in Persian to sort of disburse the ego.
We say, "Oh we are so grateful that you were able to come.
We are honored that you invited us".
And it's a kind way in its purist form of showing humility,
but it's also sometimes a wee bit hypocritical.
And at times can be as I said a way of avoiding responsibility.
We didn't know, we were only aware that we were --
so all the way through you can get fluctuations
of this different versions of the we.
And the other reason I did it, I did use this we was because and I'm
so delighted to hear that there are 40 other books on the subject
to the Iranian diaspera on your shelves.
But maybe you can tell me whether I'm correct in saying
"There was plenty of evidence of first person singular Iranians
on the book shop shelves.
But we were not the focus of attention.
Subjective stories abounded in the chain stores,
but these were not about the real we.
They were about individuals we could barely identify with.
A country that no longer existed,
a past of aesthetic sensibility belonging to the academic few,
or a place for the very rich, the very religious, the very feminist,
or the anti-feminist, the anti-rich, the anti-religious.
There were biographies of those associated with the peacock throne
or conspiracy theories about the fall of Mossadegh,
or the true confessions of those who still remembered oil
in World War II and Hitler.
Or, the fictional memoirs of pivotal figures
of the constitutional revolution.
But none of these stories actually were
about the hydra-headed contradictory, paradoxical us.
The multiple first person, plural us in Toronto and Sydney, in Bogota
and Beijing speaking Persian all over the world".
I decided that it was time to write about that paradoxical,
contradictory multiple faceted us.
And so in this book you're going to discover that us and one
of the other reasons as a writer I felt a sort of urgency about writing
in the first person plural was captured in the words of,
if I can find her, Aminatta Forna,
a marvelous sierra laonian Scottish writer, don't know if you've come
across her work.Sieranaonian wonderfully black and beautiful
and Scottish, speaking English with a strong Scottish accent.
And she wrote the following, "The way of literature", she writes,
"Is to seek universality, writers try to reach beyond those things
that divide us, culture, class, gender, race.
Given the chance we would resist classification.
I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer,
a gay writer, a black writer, an Asian writer or an African writer.
We would prefer to simply be called writers", and i would add
if one were able a human being, trying to write.
That is the greatest accolade.
And because I think writers have this capacity for universality
and don't necessarily want to be branded.
I decided to write a book about the suffocation of branding really.
The impossibility of branding the free human spirit
in one single label.
And it led me to really wonder why we do have brands.
I remember in fact, the last time I had the privilege of coming
to the Library of Congress and was talking
about the Woman who read too much.
I had a conversation with a wonderful friend,
who is sitting here today and we were talking
about political identity and identity politics.
And how strongly it is influencing our modern society.
And I found myself wondering why is it
so influential in everything we do.
And I concluded that it has something to do with the way
in which tribalism has sort of married with marketing.
And I first came across this phenomenon
when my own daughter was going through the passage of adolescence,
like so many adolescents wanting to wear black at all times.
And I found that there were shops providing for.
It had been industrialized, the gothic period
of puberty had been seized upon by marketing forces and exploited
to sell to young vulnerable people an identity that sort
of imposed itself on their individuality.
And I thought that this is happening everywhere.
This is happening on all levels of our society
where you're using these branding labels to tell us who we are,
perhaps because of an anxiety about who we are,
perhaps because we fear a kind of erosion of who we are.
But it is extremely, it is making a commodity of us I decided.
It is truly turning us into a sales object.
I wanted to read to you if I may, the beginning of a chapter
in America where the character Goli finds herself undergoing a lot
of stress.
I have to find the chapter, excuse me.
and she goes in order to relax and have a bit of calm time.
She goes to a pedicure clinic as it were.
This is Los Angeles, this is bimbo blonde Persians worrying
about their appearance with nose jobs and so forth.
"Goli was upset and her feet knew it.
They were in desperate need, that's how the brochure put it.
Are your feet in desperate need, and they were.
There was a solution of course as there was for everything in America.
Step inside pedicure perfect
and we'll change all that said the brochure.
So, Goli stepped inside, sat herself down on one
of the slippery pink chairs
of pedicure perfect and took a deep breath.
The girl who was going to change all that was called Simberline.
The tag on her left breast said so.
Americans had this habit of printing or repeating their name everywhere,
and expected you to do the same.
Goli looked at the spelling for a long time, not sure of the word.
She'd heard of American and even Persian girls called Kim,
but this sounded like the name of a logging company in Canada
or something, or a product to keep household germs at bay as they said,
or a multi-national that made sanitary pads.
She hoped the girl didn't think she was staring at her breasts,
she was only trying not to cry".
I want to compare that if you don't mind, with another little passage
which comes from the experience of the old lady coming to France.
And in this chapter BiBi John finds herself alone in Paris,
her daughter LiLi has gone off to be an artiste.
LiLi is a photographer and takes pictures of nude ladies,
which is something her mother seriously does not understand.
So BiBi John is left alone and in order to have a little bit
of company she leaves the apartment,
which I have to tell you is an extremely strange place in her mind
because it's up a serious
of very narrow stairwell going round and round.
And she gets to this tiny little apartment on the top floor,
in the marray with low ceilings and the smell of drains and everything
that a Persian lady would not like to have.
So, here she is and she decides to go to the hairdresser
and then sit in the park.
And she's going to the Plaste Voge which is of course,
one of the most exquisite places in Paris 17th century, you know Louis,
the glorious kind of architecture all the way around,
which is something she does not see at all.
"Dimly through her thick lenses Bibi saw that one
of the benches was partially free, with only a single occupant.
She approached it hopefully,
but as she drew near the elderly French woman sitting
in the middle threw such an indignant glance
at her that BiBi hesitated.
She was only going to sit on the corner, but the woman seemed
to think she was intended upon a takeover
and making a bid for independence.
She was only wearing scarf,
duty free as a protection against frizzy hair.
But this apparently made a French colony of her.
She pushed the scarf back carefully and tried to smile.
But the French woman looked pointedly away.
She had blue tinted hair
that obviously did not frizz although she may have used the same
hairdresser as BiBi.
She gave off the air of stale cologne and disapproval
as BiBi John sat gingerly down, half-way --
sat gingerly down beside her feeling foreign and resigned.
There was nowhere else to sit anyway given the pile of pigeon droppings
at the other end of the bench, so much for her hope of meeting people.
Bon jour she nodded timidly at her neighbor.
It sound like "Bon Jour".
She couldn't even get a handle on the accent.
The French woman turned slightly away ignoring her.
In fact, she looked rather nervous as well as disapproving
and who could blame her trapped in the middle of a seesaw of a bench
with an elderly lady and her headscarf sitting at one end
and a pile of pigeon droppings at the other.
She sighs because she's thinking about her daughters and the fact
that she's a burden on them, and she sighs again.
Her French neighbor with tinted hair flinched at the sigh.
It was clearly intolerable to hear a foreigner sigh,
not only once but twice.
And she must have interpreted it as a criticism towards the Republic,
for she rose abruptly at that moment and moved away.
BiBi was flustered but she wanted to apologize,
but didn't have the words.
It was useless anyway because of her accent and the lack of vocabulary.
"Oh ravah" she called out faintly as the French woman turned on her heel
and ground across the gravel.
But it was clear from the woman's enraged back as she stopped
on towards the gate that the effort towards reconciliation
and politess had not been enough".
You realize in the course of the story
that it is not only the foreigners,
however that treat the Iranians as other, as them.
It is the Iranians themselves that treat each other as them.
And many times it's the Iranians who treat the foreigners as them.
We have circles and circles of us and them in the Iranian community
and I thought it might make you laugh just a change of voice
to hear the wee voice interrupting the story of BiBi John.
And telling you from the point of view of a mother
in law what she thinks of her daughters in law.
"We have both kinds in our family.
The Eastern ones and the Westerners.
And we can promise you the first lot caused all the problems.
Getting into moods at every moment,
taking offense at the drop of a hate.
Forever overreacting to inferences, inventing reasons
to be hurt or assuming that we are.
So sensitive you can't say a thing to them without risking insult.
Communicating with the [Inaudible] girls, that is the foreigners.
It's frankly much easier with them at least you know where you are,
in spite of the language barrier.
It's straightforward, it's blunt.
They say exactly what they mean, everything is cut and dried
with them, but with our Persian daughters in law, God help us.
We have to walk on eggs the whole time
and imagine all the things they aren't saying.
In some ways it's a blessing of course, it's an advantage
that the harangues don't always understand what we're saying.
You know what we mean, at least there's no harangues with them,
no endless compliments, no twisting into insistent knots
to say what you don't actually believe.
There's none of that with the foreigners.
But in other ways it's hurtful too.
You know they can be quite tactless at times and take candor
to such an extreme that you wonder whether they lack imagination
or are simply stupid.
No courtesies, no compliments, everything at face value.
A no is a no and a yes means they should fix it.
Fixing things is what harangues are good at.
But that's where it ends.
There you are half blind, feeling for your cane
and they ask "Do you need anything"?
And of course you say, "No".
And it doesn't go one inch further.
Of course they bend and pick the cane up for you when it clatters
to the floor, that's not the point.
But then they go off with a peck on the cheek
and a cheerful good bye dumping you for the rest of the afternoon
as if the cane was really all that you're not asking for".
Well how can I tell you a little bit more about this story?
It could be that you may have looked on the blog site
for Stanford University Press and you may find there are several
of the chapters that I've already read on that,
and that could be intersting.
But there is one that I didn't read
and I might just quickly give you a taste of that.
And that's in the -- towards the end of the book again,
when we have a section on marriages or weddings, excuse me.
I should have put my little stick it things on this, but I didn't.
Oh maybe even this would be better.
This is a little bit about a reflection
on why I've used this structure in fact
and it's a small chapter called "Losing the Plot".
And it's about the way in which Iranians write stories.
You know we've got great tradition of poetry in Iran.
We've also got a most fascinating tradition in passion plays
but we don't' necessarily have the same tradition in novel writing.
We don't' have that wonderful western psychological realism
tradition which we have learned because we're good at imitating.
There's a chapter in this book called "Imitation"
about the way we know how to imitate.
But we have borrowed the psychological realism structure
of the novel.
It doesn't come natural to the person psyche
and in this chapter called "Losing the plot" I explore that idea.
"The old film ended as such films do with a drum roll
of a sunset, or was it a sun rise?
Which faded into the chant of an opening rose.
It was a splendid climax.
We liked the grand finale of a sunset or a sunrise.
We love a film resolving in a rose,
all our fears melt with that lovely image.
All our hopes blossom with that stirring sound.
There is something characteristically Persian,
classically Iranian about those symbols.
You really can't go wrong with them as far as we're concerned.
Of course there is the reed too, the other metaphor of ours,
yes we can't do without the reed.
More anguished than the rose.
More visceral than the sunset, expressive of suffering
of martyrdom, of existential pain in the old poems,
rude hangs grasped me, slashed me to the core, brute fingers plucked me
from the soft river floor.
Such images are appropriate to our heritage, our religion our history.
They recall the anguish and ardor of the nightingale that ultimate icon
of our culture and our art.
They remind us that the golden lion on who's back the son
of the old regime rose and set bore a loft of curved and cruel symatog.
We're referring to the older regime naturally,
the regime of the 19th century.
The one before the one most people now call old, or rather what we used
to call old before we became it ourselves.
Persians think, people think that Persians are good at plots.
They think we are masters of storytelling, the then
and the and then of charizod.
But it's not metaphorical logic we prefer.
Metaphors are our forte, we love the way metaphors and similes shift
and change, ignoring consequence reversing temporal direction.
Conspiracy theories we have no trouble with, but we are not so hot
on plot, at least in the narrative sense.
What we look for in the film are the roses and the sunsets, and the reed.
My skin they fluid until I was raw.
My lips they split, my throat they cruelly tore".
I won't go on because that's just a taste of this book
and it's also an apologies for why I haven't fitted the brand
of a normal novel telling you the psychological realistic story
of one individual all the way through to the end.
This is a story about a family and a fractured family.
It's a story about a whole culture that has been scattered
and fractured across the planet.
And I do hope that in reading it you might find something in it
that you also associate with.
I came across a marvelous statement by Mossan Hamid,
the writer of the reluctant fundamentalist who has also come
out with a fascinating book called Exit West,
on migrants which maybe you have on your library shelves.
He said, "even people who stay in the same place undergo a kind
of migration through time, everyone is a migrant".
And I do hope that this book really does appeal
to many other kinds of groups.
Aminatta Forna, the marvelous Siera Leonian Scotts writer I mentioned
says something about branding,
which I thought would be useful to remember.
Sometimes she says, we need labels just to be able
to describe the thing we're talking about,
but labels confirm the limitations of language
and when they are overused they become limiting.
And perhaps the last quote I could use for today is one
from marvels Marilyn Robinson who I greatly revere.
"When people draw a bright line between us and then", she writes,
"Those on the other side of the line are assumed
to be unworthy of respect or hearing.
And are in fact regarded as a huge problem to the us
who presume to judge them.
When this assumption takes hold, the definition of community hardens
and becomes violently exclusive and defensive.
Definitions of us and them begin to contract and as they shrink
and narrow becoming increasingly inflamed or dangerous and inhumane,
this tedious pattern has repeated itself endlessly
through human history.
And it is the end of community and the beginning of tribalism".
I think we're all quite aware of the fact that we're living at a time
when those definitions have contracted, have hardened,
are producing notions of narrowness that divide us from one another.
And this has happened before and we've known it in history
and we have noticed that when there is that recoil that retraction,
that reaction against being open it is inevitably followed by a kind
of turning of the tide and the wave comes rolling back again
and we find ourselves being far more inclusive,
it was a recoil in the 30's.
It was an expansion again after the second World War.
I hope we don't have to have another war
but the recoil is certainly building up to a Tsunami type proportion now.
I can only hope that we will reach
out to each other even more as a result.
Certainly the recoil has been repeated
but so has the positive reaction to it, the desire to be inclusive.
If my book can promote that movement even slightly, I will be grateful.
And very grateful indeed to have this opportunity to talk to you.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Hirad Dinavari: Thank you very much Dr. Nakhjavani.
We have some opportunity for questions.
Mary-Jane has a question for you, go ahead.
>> I want to thank you so much, it was a very, very --
it was a fascinating book presentation.
I am wondering, I wonder what you think
about another way of looking at labeling.
Is it a way also, in addition to explaining
that which is not easily understood?
Because if you have a label you can add all kind of attitudes
and all kinds of values [Inaudible].
Just explain the other who is not, who doesn't fit into one
of the categories that us or the other.
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Yes.
>> So can it be also a lazy way of saying "Why do I have
to understand that person"?
I can just [Inaudible] and then I don't need to understand.
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: I think you're absolutely right.
It's an easy shorthand.
It's a form of shorthand.
It doesn't have to be nefarious.
It's got a kind of innocence to it.
A substitute for explaining.
but I think that it's been exploited and it's been used to divide.
And I think that's also been in some ways the act of separation
and distinctiveness of our identities in terms of culture;
in terms of gender have been a necessary process for our society.
We've been thrown in into each other's laps in a way
that never happened before.
We were always in our little bubbles until war and colonialism
and expansion of empire and exploitation
of differences have forced us to confront each other.
And with the 20th century I think we find ourselves jostling
in these conditions trying to figure out where do I belong?
So it's been a -- I've always thought of it as a process
of adolescence that we're having to go through.
As adolescents we need to define ourselves from our families,
from our siblings to distinguish ourselves as individuals.
It's very healthy to do so and I think we have,
and are in the process of doing that.
But I think you can see the beginning signs
of where it becomes what Marilyn Robinson is describing
and then the laziness becomes dangerous and then we begin to need
to question how far we can push that, how far we can let it just go
because we need to have more of the unites while keeping our distinction
than more that differentiates, yes.
Yes please.
>> I just finished an article [Inaudible] it's one of the things
as you were just speaking that I wondered about.
There's the question of who is defining universal, right?
It's the branding, if there is this universal is it an
expansive universal?
Or is it universal that is like the colonial powers
of understanding the universal and then how do people react to that?
And one of the ideas that I was reading about that as I was working
on this encyclopedia article, I'm curious whether this rings true
in some way, not as a good thing but like accurate description is
that part of what you're struggling with his how to retain a sense
of a cultural identify from whatever piece of the bubble mattered.
In this new place consumption, and therefore marketing,
is it really easy quantifiable way to do it?
I can -- I don't know I am the daughter
of the [Inaudible] daughter in law, right?
And so I can be here in my mother's culture except when I want to put
on a [Inaudible] or something like that,
and a piece of my father's culture and wear it.
Until I want to take it off again, right?
So that I can go back to being and that would be true too
if I weren't the daughter of a [Inaudible] daughter in law.
If I were one of my cousins, two immigrants.
It's this way and it doesn't really work because it's not necessarily --
but I'm wondering if that makes sense, push and pull?
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Yes,
well I think what you're describing is something all immigrants have
done putting the hat on, taking it off, wearing this costume when we're
in this group, taking it off when we're in another.
But I do believe wholeheartedly in the organic process of civilization.
I think the human species has extraordinary capacities to absorb
and to maybe it's because I look at what the English language has done.
It is an absorbing process that happens in language.
And that is an extension of the human mind.
It's what's going up on here in the neurons, the new patterns
and pathways that we're creating.
The English language has this way of sucking in all the differences.
There is no universal culture that is imposing itself on the new word.
It is that word that is influencing the use of language as a whole.
And so I don't think it's either you get imposed upon or you impose.
I think there is an organic process going on here,
and I think the artificial divisions of colonialism
and even industrialization and commodify --
these are artificial processes to buy and sell.
There is a buyer and a seller, so as long as we can shift the focus
so that everybody is selling and everybody is buying,
you know if we're going to use that metaphor, it has to be more organic.
It has to flow across the boundaries.
I wrote a chapter in here about assimilation,
it's called "Assimilation" and it starts off with a new comer
from Iran, confronting Iranians who have been
out of the country for a long time.
And when she first comes she's very anxious
to be accepted by the old comers.
So she's trying very hard to be terribly modern and secular
and disregarding what is in Iran and identifying herself
as totally atheist and non-connected with Islam as it were.
And as the story progresses,
I don't want to give the game away completely.
But we see the shift in her assimilation
and we see her assimilation affecting the fact that she's
out of the country, is affecting her.
It's affecting her interlocutors as well.
Their position is being affected by her reactions to begin abroad.
And so it's that osmosis which I think is interesting
and the constant reminder that we are not mechanical creatures,
we are not parts of some artificial organism.
We are an organism, we're not man made.
We have the capacity to change extraordinarily
and to affect change.
So I don't know who the universal us is going to be.
I don't know what the universal language is going to be.
I hope it's a little bit more interesting than Globish is
at the moment, you know what I mean?
I have hope that we can perhaps enrich rather
than impoverish who we are.
>> Quick comments and then a question.
[ Inaudible ]
>> The second thing I was going to say
in many ways what you were describing is a universal feeling
not just particularly in the acceptance of people in France.
Everybody who has gone to France has undergone that.
>> Absolutely.
>> I know they pretend like they don't understand what I'm saying
and look at me quizzically.
But I have a question that I've always wondered.
I have a lot of Iranian friends who only associate themselves
with begin Persian but not being Iranian, what is that phenomenon
where they're not associating with the country but with a culture?
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Well somebody asked me that same question
when I was in San Francisco and it really is interesting
that we've subdivided Iran and Persia.
But bear in mind that Persia was also the name
of the country before it --
there have been fluctuations in the historical naming of this land.
I don't know, I think the people who prefer
to call themselves Persian are making a branding statement
about their non-identification with the present regime.
I mean people have all kinds of reasons
for why they put symboline on their left breast.
I went through a period where I liked being called Persian.
Because I liked the sound and I remember the little pink country
on the map when I was growing up and it was called Persia,
but it wasn't necessarily for political reasons.
But I think you're right we associate the word Persia
with nightingales, roses, music, literature and we imagine
that Iran does not mean that.
But that similarly come across young Iranians
and very often they're young, not necessarily only young
but who are very very patriotic about the word Iran
and the greatness of Iran and the glory
of the past civilization so Iran.
So they were also being proudly Iranian and it had nothing
to do with the present regime.
So I think it really depends on the temperament,
the personality whoever it happens to be.
We're always looking for identity and this is the whole issue.
Is our identity actually helping others also be included
or are we making a statement that excludes or is this just a phase
or you know it's all good, it's all good so long
as it doesn't make us feel nervous about anybody.
[ Inaudible ]
>> People kind of label to what they [Inaudible] Now if you actually look
on those books, there are minute shades of differences
across the meaning of those books on the shelf.
And this would be true of yours, it covers a unique slice.
this is what I think is interesting about this whole process.
Is that I'm kind of a [Inaudible] Iranians like yours,
you're Iranian you must like mirrors.
Wrong?
>> Wrong.
>> But you get into these problems and that's
where I think there's some kind of conflict
and I don't' know how you see this with the,
I think you address it well in the beauty parlor
or this person perceives some kind of other and does'
like it because of the labeling.
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Well I think the labeling;
I myself have been constantly shifting
around not knowing how to be branded.
I mean I get branded by the publisher,
you know they want to fix the label on you.
The women who read too much suddenly became a feminist novel.
Or I become an Iranian writer because I happen
to be speaking about Iran.
And I think the genre of categories in book shops force you
into these little pockets and this is something,
this is a new phenomena.
This is about trying desperately to sell books.
150 years ago we never had these categorizations.
We were just trying to write, and writing about what we knew.
Can you imagine Jane Austin being labeled?
First of all she would have cringed at the thought of being identified
on a market shelf, but I think this is something that we have
to question because it goes very deep
into our politics how money is influencing our choices
of who we are, who we elect, what kind of country we want to have.
It's so profoundly deep in our society,
everywhere including France.
So yeah.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: I'm so glad you said
that because economics is fundamental to this story
and you see people who have had a great deal, who lose everything.
And people how have a great deal but don't feel connected to those
that don't have in this community.
And I particularly wanted to look at the way
in which people how have had a lot and lose everything, react to that.
Some who spend the rest of their lives in mourning and in lamentation
for what could have been and what was.
And others who pull themselves up by their socks and become something new
and create a new creation out of themselves as a result
of this deprivation and this loss and shaping up and separation
from all that is familiar.
and in particular I've been fascinated by how
that affects the women here.
I hope that doesn't make me a feminist,
but I really have been interested
because in traditional Iranian society women especially
in the wealthy sector were ornaments and were there
to grace the lapel of the family.
But when they find themselves deprived of everything and end
up working in a supermarket and through toil
and hard work getting their kids raised, that's strength of character
and that's reality in who they are.
It's not their brand, it's their strength and side.
And I was hoping to break through the us and them in order
to show that inner strength.
This is a book called us and them with the connected
in the middle of us and them.
It's not us vs. them, it's not us or them.
It's not even us, gap, and gap them.
It's us and them.
So I hope that that new word
that combines the two illustrates the sort of strength that we need
to rise above these and to bring together the extremes
that are pulling societies apart.
Yeah.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Exactly and that's the beautiful irony you know?
You find that the deprivation is actually the opportunity
for growth sometimes.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: That's so interesting.
First of all I must say that universal element,
that rootedness in our identity.
I played with that through the metaphor of smells in this book.
So all the way through you've got a thread of feno Greek
and wherever you happen to go there is Persian [Inaudible]
and it does not change no matter
which country you're in or anything else.
The symbol of that thing which keeps us always Persian or Iranian
but what you said about Iranian film I think is
so important and so interesting.
In that chapter that I read a little bit of called losing the plot,
at the end of that chapter because it starts
if you recall about a film.
It says the old film ended as most of these old films do with a sunset
and a rose and it ends up talking about modern film,
modern Iranian film and you realize that the voice of the we here
as clearly distinguished in the beginning that we are old.
The old we has great difficulty with modern Iranian film, and the reason
for it is maybe I could just read one little tiny paragraph
to clarify what I mean, or is there no time.
No time, you have to read the book.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
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