Over the past couple of years, I have been reading and following the debates that have surrounded Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. I just finished reading Bahmani’s blog Stop Reading Lolita in Tehran. Although I agree with Bahmani and all the other debates that have surrounded this book, particularly in relation to the representation of the Iranian women and the allegories that the book draws on the Iranian women and Lolita, I have to draw everyone’s attention on the representation of the Iranian man in the book. I believe that this book–and all the other so called feminist books emerging from the Middle East that address the issues of women–are also in a way constructing and forming a specific image of the Iranian man and Iranian (and Middle Eastern) masculinities that is repeating and confirming a certain negative image of the Iranian man in the West, leaving very little room for the Iranian man to be identified as a human being with feelings.

RLT, at first glance, promises ‘us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran,’ offering us very little about the Iranian man. However, I believe that if this book is read contrapuntally, that is as Edward Said puts it ‘with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented,’ I believe that it is also a book that offers us a glimpse into the mannerisms and characteristics of the Iranian men. Here I wish to locate and extend the marginal presence of the Iranian men in RLT, in order to understand how that marginality has shaped much of our understanding of him. But, as Said reminds us, because ‘each cultural work is a vision of a moment,’ located and received within a specific socio-political and cultural setting, reading contrapuntally does mean reading the marginal in the vacuum of its marginality; rather when approaching the text we ‘must open it out both to what went into it and to what its author excluded.’ This means that in locating and contextualizing the marginality of the Iranian men in RLT, we must first have a clear understanding of what the text represents about the Iranian women, as well as the socio-political, historical and discursive framework into which it is received.

A quick glance of what RLT does represent, reveals a gloomy and strictly gender-dichotomous fundamentalist society. In this society, women, represented by the seven girls who attended Nafisi’s private book club, live under constant fear of their domineering brothers, fathers, or other male family members in private, and in public are ‘subservient to politics and subject to the arbitrary rules,’ of the society which dictates their every action, from who they interact with to what they wear. Nafisi sets up this position through the girls in the very first day of the book club, when she introduces each girl in relation to the difficulties she has had with her male family members to get herself to that first session. For instance, Sanaz is seen running into Nafisi’s house for the first session of the book club looking ‘harassed, as if she had been running from a stalker or a thief,’ after her younger brother ‘the darling of their parents,’ who had ‘taken to proving his masculinity by spying on her, listening to her phone conversations, driving her car around and monitoring her actions,’ had dropped her off with disapproval. Another girl, Nassrin, reveals in a conversation with Nafisi how she could finally make it to the book club: ‘I mentioned the idea [of attending this book club] very casually to my father, just to test his reaction, and he vehemently disapproved. How did you convince him to let you come? I asked. I lied, she said. You lied? What else can one do with a person who’s so dictatorial who won’t let his daughter at this age, go to an all-female literature class?’ A few weeks into the book club, Nafisi writes, ‘Sanaz’s brother was by now…one of a series of male villains who resurfaced from week to week.’ As the sessions proceed, in each session men are vilified in various accounts and each girl reveals more of her fear of her male family members. Nassrin, for instance, eventually reveals how ‘her youngest uncle, a very devout and pious man, had sexually abused her when she was barely eleven years old. She recounts ‘how he used to say that the he wanted to keep himself chaste and pure for his future wife and refused friendships with women on that count….He used to tutor Nassrin…three times a week for over a year. He helped her with Arabic and sometimes with mathematics. During those sessions as they sat side by side at her desk, his hands had wandered over her legs, her whole body, as she repeated the Arabic tenses.’

In Nafisi’s descriptions, it is not only in the private domain that these male villains pop up. In the public domain Iranian women are under religious and political domination and live in constant fear of being harassed by people on the street. As she puts it, ‘a stern Ayatollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land,’ and under his rule ‘[women] were never free of the regime’s definition of them as Muslim women.’ Although this is constantly a theme of discussion during the book club, in one particular situation, Nafisi portrays this condition of the Iranian women in public by drawing on one of the girls’ typical walks from her book club back home. She appeals to the readers to imagine one of her student as she leaves the privacy of the book club and heads home: “Let’s imagine one of the girls, say Sanaz, leaving my house…She puts on her black robe and scarf over her orange shirt and jeans, coiling her scarf around her neck…We follow Sanaz down the stairs, out the door and into the street. You might notice that her gait and her gestures have changed. It is in her best interest not to be seen, not to be hard to noticed. She doesn’t walk upright, but bends her head towards the ground and doesn’t look at passersby. She walks quickly and with a sense of determination. The streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities are patrolled by militia, who ride in white Toyota patrols, four gun-carrying men and women….They patrol the streets to make sure that women like Sanaz wear their veils properly, do not wear make up, do not walk in public with men who are not their fathers, brothers or husbands….If she gets on a bus, the seating is segregated. She must enter through the rear door and sit in the back seats, allocated to women. Yet in taxis, which accept as many as five passengers, men and women are squeezed together, like sardines….where so many of my students complain of being harassed by bearded and God-fearing men….”

This sort of description of the Iranian society as an insecure world filled with ‘goblins and witches,’ who are out to get the women, is repeated throughout the book and informs much of our understanding of the position of the Iranian woman in the public domain.

The above points, although painting us a supposed portrait of the condition of the Iranian women, do not give us much detailed description about the Iranian man. However, read contrapuntally, they are indeed directly feeding into the construction and maintenance of a certain image of the Iranian man that is hypervisible as a negative type in the West. Here, the position of the Iranian woman could be described in the context of what Foucault has called the “already-said,” or rather the repressed “never-said” of the obvious. By positioning the Iranian woman as the embodiment of oppressed womanhood, Nafisi is representing herself as the representative of the western woman, an epitome of modernity and progress that confirms the Iranian/Middle Eastern women’s oppression. Nafisi feeds on this position of privilege constantly, to demonstrate the Iranian women’s oppression. For example, after a lengthy conversation with one of the girls, Yassi, who has just revealed to Nafisi how her family had limited her every move, Nafisi writes, ‘Could she ever live the life of someone like me, live on her own, take long walks holding hands with someone she loved, even have a little dog? She did not know.’ These representations of the oppressed Iranian women, and the first hand affirmations of our narrators, signals towards the stereotypical character of the Iranian men as controlling, with absurd sexual deviance and fanatically religious beliefs. In most case we arrive at these character conclusions through the women’s descriptions, in the men’s invisibility, without having come across a single man who actually demonstrates these presumed characteristics first hand.

Although most of our information about the Iranian men in RLT comes through the women’s account, it would be untrue to say that men, as characters themselves are completely absent from the book. Men do appear as characters throughout the book. However, when they do pop up they are marginal cardboard types of characters of students, university officials or the revolutionary guards, of whom Nafisi does not have a high regard and to whom she does not give enough space to be developed as realistic characters. While Nafisi spends a considerable length in developing the characters of her female students, except in a few cases when she is describing her Western educated male friends who live in Tehran, when it comes to describing some of the male students she is reductive and her descriptions of them are as primitive people whose personality is reduced to their religious interests. For example, in describing one of the recurring male students, Mr. Bahri, in her class she writes, “Mr. Bahri, who was at first reluctant to talk in class, began after our meeting to make insightful remarks. He spoke slowly, as if forming his ideas in the process of expressing them, pausing between words and sentences. Sometimes he seemed to me like a child just beginning to walk, testing the ground and discovering unknown potentials within himself. He was also becoming increasingly immersed in politics. He become an active member of the student group supported by the government—the Muslim Students’ Association—and more and more often I would find him in the hallways immersed in arguments…..”

Such representations of the Iranian man, as one-dimensional beings, are extremely problematic in the context in which they are represented. Not only do they reductive of the identity of the Iranian man, they are also directly contributing to a further emphasis of the hypervisiblity of the Iranian as a specific type, particularly in a post-9/11 climate. The fact is that these representations, particularly when appearing in true accounts as memoirs, have been specially problematic and reductive of the individual character of the Iranian man, adding to the already complicated social problems that Iranian men face in diaspora.

Additionally, on global scale, such representations of the Iranian man could be seen as feeding into the post 9/11 discourse of War on Terror where the abuse of women and the denial of their rights has been used as a mark of barbarism and an indication of a social sickness, that requires intervention. When Nafisi constantly emphasizes the lives of Iranian women as ‘doomed’ in various ways, claiming that ‘the [Western] novels were an escape from the reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection, and leave aside our stories about the deans and the morality squads on the streets,’ her words could be read as feeding into the discourse that appeals for the salvation of the brown woman from the brown man by the white man.

In short, RLT paints a very unrealistic and one-dimensional picture of the Iranian man that can be potentially damaging to the identities and images of some of our wonderful Iranian men.

Earlier this year, I had the great fortune of traveling to Afghanistan with Amin Palangi, to work on a film with the Afghan-Australian charity organization, Mahboba’s Promise.  This was my third trip into Afghanistan since 2006 and because of the way we traveled and lived this time, I had a chance to glimpse into some of the reality of life in Afghanistan.  Upon return, I decided that I must write this story.  Here, I want to share with you an early draft of what might be an introductory chapter of that tale…

1.

I opened my eyes as the plane gradually began its slow descent among the snow-capped majestic mountains that surround Kabul like a bowl.  The outlines of the city became visible and having just flown over the bustling landscape of Tehran a few hours ago, which over the last decade has mushroomed beyond its form and capacity, I noticed the clear structure of Kabul. The wide roads that ran through the city and separated suburbs spoke of the legacy of the pre-war promise of structured urban planning. Although this was my third time landing in Kabul, I had only noticed the structure of the city this time, perhaps because I was not as nervous as I had been the first two times.  I was incredibly surprised at my own calmness despite the drama about the insecurity that surrounded our departure in Tehran and despite the fact that this time around it was just Amin and I travelling and we had no idea what anticipated us on the ground.

I held Amin’s hand as the plane landed and prayed that we had made the right decision and that the outcome of this trip would be fruitful.  The night before we had left Tehran for Kabul, my father told me that Amin and I should make this trip for the sake of the many thousands of children whose stories we could tell the world through the film and not for our own profits and benefits.  We would be doing a great service to the world, he said, and if we made that our true purpose we would not only be protected but everything would work out well. I believed him and during our transit in the city of Mashhad from Tehran to Kabul, when we went to visit the shrine of the Imam Reza the eighth Imam of the Shiite Muslims in the few hours of stopover, I stood in the glittering mirrored halls of the shrine wearing a white floral chador over my head, surrounded by thousands of faithful pilgrims who had gathered during the Iranian New Year holidays fervently praying to the Imam, and I asked in silence from the bottom of my heart that we would be guided in doing this project for the benefit of the children.

Strolling along the runway tarmac in Kabul several hours later as we passed the huge billboard of Ahmad Shah Massoud that stands above the arrival’s building I tried to remind myself of that moment in Mashhad. I took a deep cool breath of the fresh Kabul air and took firm steps following the immigration officers, who guided the passengers into the immigration hall. The immigration hall had not changed much since three years before. It was still a dimly lit room with large windows that looked onto the runway. While we lined up to have our passports checked, in contrast to my calmness, Amin seemed edgy and nervous and particularly irritated by the man behind us in the line who was pushing us to go ahead when the officer had not asked us to step forward to have our visas checked.  But Amin obviously relaxed when the blond and green eyed clean shaven visa officer had to have a double-look at Amin and the picture on his Iranian passport, which was from ten years before and looked nothing like Amin then, and made a joke about how it is about time he changed his passport or other countries would not let him and think its counterfeit. Welcome to Afghanistan, he smirked and with one quick action put a chop on Amin’s visa.

Upon arrival people dissipated quickly into the dark arrival’s hall where a luggage conveyor belt rolled slowly trying to haul the heavy and oversized suitcases that had come off our plane.  Looking at the conveyor belt and the number of people waiting for their luggage, I was glad we had made the decision to travel light and not check anything.  Instead, pulling behind us two small bags, we trotted around looking for Mahboba’s brother, Siddiq who was supposed to pick us up from the airport. We had never met Siddiq and had no idea what he looked like. Nonetheless, we walked beyond the dark room into the bright entrance of the airport, waiting for someone to approach us. But soon the small airport emptied, as the last of men and women pushing cartfuls of bags walked out of the airport. The airport was empty of arrivals, leaving Amin and I, standing patiently, being observed by immigration officers, shopkeepers and the police who began to look at us suspiciously.  Our plane had landed as anticipated at twelve thirty. Waiting for the first half an hour, I was not worried. Given the road conditions in Kabul, I thought that perhaps Sidiq was stuck in traffic. So, I sat back and observed the airport. The obvious change in the airport was the lack of the presence of the American forces. Gone was the fortified base at the entrance to the building with the armed and fully uniformed military men in helmets and bullet proof vests who really made you feel like you had entered a war zone three years before.  Where the American armed guards had been there was now a huge security stall covered by a green and white advertisement sponsored by the phone company Itisalat that promoted women’s education. The green and white ad read in Dari “a healthy society equals healthy and educated women.” Women, it seemed had also replaced the American soldiers. There were a number of women officers who patrolled the airport in their deep grey uniforms of long skirts and jackets and loosely worn black scarves.  As one of the few women passengers in the airport, wearing a long black oversized robe that I had borrowed from my mom and covering my hair with a brown shawl and a black tight hat underneath, the women officers smiled at me and nodded, and I nodded back with a smile.  This was a much better greeting at the airport that the one we had received three years before with the armed guards.

At around one fifteen, forty-five minutes after we had landed, I began to be concerned.  I thought that perhaps the wrong date was given to Siddiq but Amin assured me that on the last email he had specified that he would be waiting for us on that day. I suggested that we buy some credit for our phone and call him, but soon we realized that the only number that we had of Siddiq was a mobile number from Australia. A shopkeeper, selling all sorts of imported assorted snacks and drinks from Iran and who had been busy watching us in the empty airport, suggested that we take a taxi, but rummaging through our notes we realized that we did not actually have any address of our destination. Although up to then I had been fairly relaxed, the realization that we had no contact information or number of the people who were supposed to pick us up, suddenly brought forth a series of restrained worries. I sat down in disbelief of my own complacency and carelessness in organizing this trip as Amin tried to find ways of contacting Mahboba in Sydney to get Sidiq’s number in Kabul.  How could I have been so naïve and come so unprepared? But what would happen if we could not get in touch with anyone? We were going into a war zone and all that I had based my trip on had been faith and prayer that all would be well. In my head I began to question our purpose for being there—suddenly like our arrival, the whole direction of trip seemed unplanned and unstructured.  We only had a vague idea of a story of a possible marriage at the orphanage that we wanted to follow and film, what if that did not work out? Mahboba was supposed to bring us the camera and equipment from Sydney in two days’ time, what if she did not actually come herself or manage to bring the equipment? How was our safety to be assured during this trip?  What if one of us was shot, hurt or even died? What seemed to have been a perfectly sound and logical idea, or what I had convinced myself of it to be despite everyone’s disapproval, after a sleepless night and panic in the absence of someone to pick us up, now seemed rather illogical, irresponsible and even dangerous. I tried to convince myself by picturing the worst possible scenario. If no one turned up, we could always take a taxi to the Intercontinental Hotel, the place we had stayed at the last two times, have a nice hot shower and a meal, rest, and then get in touch with someone to sort out our situation.

As I was trying to figure out possible escape routes, at around two, we found Sidiq’s number. As I had been planning, Amin had called Mahboba’s son, Soroush, in Australia.  The Iranian-import shopkeeper also allowed the use of his mobile phone for overseas calls for ridiculously expensive prices and Amin had used his services to call Mahboba’s son to get Sidiq’s number.  Mahboba had already left for Kabul, so Soroush had had to call his aunt in Sydney to get Sidiq’s number and Amin had to call back to get the number. As it turned out Sidiq and his driver had been waiting for us at the car park since twelve but they had not been permitted entrance to the airport compound since only special vehicles, convoys and people with tickets could go past beyond a certain area.  He directed us to walk out of the main airport building towards the parking.  As we walked away from the main compound of the airport, we immediately recognized Sidiq across the car park because of his great resemblance to Mahboba. Sidiq walked towards us.  He was very tall and with a very straight back.  In the cool weather of Kabul he was wearing a long black overcoat, a white shirt and black pants and a white skullcap over his peppered hair.  His wide nose and broad smile, somehow reminded me of a lion; a resemblance reinforced throughout the trip in his determinism, and his role as the father of the orphanage. He was like the King of the Jungle who protected the cubs from the harsh realities of the violent and merciless Jungle of Afghanistan. Sidiq greeted us kindly and apologized for the lack of communication. Together, we crossed the armed barricades that separated the parking from the airport and walked towards his car. Up to the then, the car park that we had walked through had been empty, but once beyond the barricades, men in traditional white Afghani clothes squatted next to some barbed wiring on the ground awaiting the arrival of their passengers in an area that resembled a garden some time ago but was now only muddy paddock. We were stared down by the squatting men as we passed through the paddock. Sidiq directed us towards a grey van, one of the few cars remaining in the area, where two young men awaited our arrival.  Sidiq introduced them as Jameel and Bashir. Jameel was a young man of about twenty-six with dark skin, and curly hair, and intense green eyes. He was wearing white Afghani Shalwar and Kamiz, baggy pants and a long loose top, and on top of that he was wearing a black leather jacket, which I found a common but odd fashion combination all across Kabul. Bashir, who was twenty as I found out later when he proudly showed off his university ID, and who we later realized was Jameel’s younger brother, was whiter and rounder than Jameel. He had dark and kind eyes and short curly hair, and unlike Jameel he tried to be more stylish by the Western standards.  He wore a pair of jeans with a metal strap against its front zipper with stars and Xs carved into it, which immediately attracted the eye to his crutch, on the sides of his pants one leg was stamped with Boss and the other with Diesel and on top of that he was wearing a collared crinkly bluish purple shirt, topped up with a dark jacket.  Jameel and Bashir helped put our bags in the back of the van and we climbed onto the car that had a printed sign on its front window: Hope House: The Orphanage of Hazrat Mohammad.

As we sat in the van, I could not believe we had arrived.  A week before, the trip had come to a near halt, and yet here we were. Sitting in the van, my earlier concerns disguised themselves under a fidgety excitement of our arrival.   Faith returned and everything seemed in order.  Still hazy from the short hours of sleep the previous night, our presence in the car seemed very dreamy and surreal.  As Jameel drove us through the dusty city for about half an hour, my immediate reaction was that the streets were cleaner and dotted with fewer beggars.  There was also significantly less American presence in the city. There were no American tanks or soldiers that patrolled the streets.  Instead the presence of the Afghan police force was undeniable with their armed guards that roamed the streets on the back of dark green pickups ready to shoot.  We drove past some of the familiar compounds of the political centre of the city, Vazir Akbar Khan.  We knew this area well from the last trip. We had spent a considerable time at the Aina Media Centre, a French run media organization, which was located right at the heart of the busy district.  Because it was Friday and the official day of rest for the Afghans, we quickly drove through the then- barren cemented and fortified city centre.  Had this been a weekday, at that hour we would have been caught in some of the heaviest traffic flows of Kabul. Amin and I excitedly pointed out familiar buildings like the Iranian embassy that took up an entire block and which on weekdays was the most crowded block of the area with hundreds of people lining up everyday to try their luck at escaping to Iran. The American embassy was also recognizable, not because we remembered it from the last trips but because it was the heaviest fortified compound in the area with huge several-meter-thick cement blocks, which like their presence in the country, was intrusive to the city’s natural landscape. Next to the compound, heavily armed guards in complete gear from helmets and bulletproof vests fearfully eyed every innocent holiday shopper and family suspiciously.

Sidiq, Jameel and Bashir who were impressed by our knowledge of the city, joked that we were practically locals. Amin, who loves to quickly blend into a new environment, responded to them with a Dari dialect, which had everybody laughing.  As we were leaving the area I recognized the street with the park at its corner where Aryan Bank, the bank that my father had worked for and helped establish several years before. Sidiq was surprised that my father had worked in Afghanistan and I explained to him that it had been because of his presence that we had first come to Afghanistan three years before.

Soon, we crossed beyond known territory and entered onto a wide road that took us all the way to the north of the city.  Along the way, we passed an industrial part of the city with shops that sold construction equipment such as metal and wood.  Dotted along the way were red, green and bright blue doors that stood out against the dusty earth of the city but led to nowhere.  Passed the home renovations were car sellers, and cars of every quality from Toyotas to Jeeps and Hummers were packed in huge parking lots. By this time, we were nearing the foothills of the mountains and the air already felt freshers and cooler than the city centre. Passed the car sellers, Jameel turned into the dusty central divide of the fast paced highway and waited for the oncoming vehicles to pass before turning into an unasphalted and bumpy wide street.  Dividing this street were rows of newly planted dust-choked saplings that barely stood up against the weight of the heavy dust and traffic.  To our right and left were empty lots of land all the way to the foot of the mountains some of which were surrounded by short brick walls and bright doors that marked people’s allocated property.  Along the way there a few half-finished multi-story brick houses with large balconies and extravagant decorations of bird and eagle statues. These houses in this area were brand new and did not bear any resemblance to the bomb-shelled mud houses with plastic windows all around Kabul.  Later we learned that in that area, which was called Kart-e-ye Nejat, the government only allowed the building of brick houses, as opposed to mud houses that dotted the city elsewhere. Because of this restriction, and the high cost of bricks and proper building material, a lot of people who had land could not afford to build and many who had started had to abandon the project half way and live in wall-less, damp and dripping houses, until they had enough money to finish their house.

Passed the unfinished houses, we turned left into an even bumpier street with a huge ditch at the front of it, which Jameel had to avoid carefully.  From here, the white and blue building of the Hope House became clearly visible. My heart began to race as we approached the metal door and Jameel honked the horn.  Someone opened the door and we drove under the red and green arch that read The Orphanage of Hazart Mohammad. I tried to contain my emotions but my eyes still welled up with tears.  I could not believe we were really there.  Amin held my hand and squeezed it, saying, here we go.  I knew at that moment that I had made the right choice, and despite all the risks and difficulties, there was nowhere else on earth I would rather have been at that moment than the Hope House of Mahboba’s Promise.  I was happy I had allowed faith to be my guide….

Dearest Reader,

The contents of this blog have long been in the making.  Over the years I have contemplated and toyed with the idea of having a blog, but until recently I didn’t think that I was ready to face the world, or rather that I had anything of true worth to contribute to the world—there are enough blogs out there that don’t add anything to this world.  But recently, as I am proceeding further into my studies, I began feel an itch and a nagging voice in the back of my head keeps telling me—share share share—you do have something to add!  But about three weeks ago, after a couple of encounters, this itch became unbearable and I made the decision that I must write, that writing was my duty because that is, almost, the only thing in the world that makes me me!

Of the encounters, the first was at a friend’s house.  She had invited us to meet several of her Iranian friends for the first time.  This group of people consisted of a mix of Iranians, graduate students, graphic and web designers, nurses and doctors, who gathered under one common goal: to come together as Iranians to form a community and to represent themselves properly in the Australian community.  As everyone began talking about their ideas and ways of uniting as Iranians and blending into the Australian community, everyone came to the common conclusion that the best way for Iranians to unite and come together was through representation and artistic expression.

Up to that point of the night, I had sat silently and observed these people talk about uniting and failed attempts at creating communities.  But I could no longer hold my peace—the problem was very obvious.  As Iranians we are unable to represent ourselves and allow that representation to be a uniting factor for both a community and for the way we are seen in the West because we are not representing ourselves positively. Although I don’t normally bring my academic research into social situations, I realized this was an exception because at the heart of what they were saying lay the one of the topics that I was analysing in my thesis on post-revolutionary diasporic Iranian writing in English—I explained to them that the problem lay in how we are represented and how we represent ourselves.  Just take a look at the books that are out there.  Apart from a few recent ones, most of them are either negative portrayals of the Iran, ignore the ancient culture and heritage of Iran or are reflective of one demographic of the Iranian society but whose representation has become the Bible of life in Iran.  If we are to unite or even claim to be the voice of a nation, we have to put aside our individual gains and pains and take a hard look at how we want to be representatives of our culture.  You would think this would be an obvious fact, but I stirred an excitement in the group and I was told that the topic of my research (which is also a personal obsession) was much food for thought.  The idea of writing an blog was seeded that night.

The second encounter, came about week after, at an event at my university called Speed Thesis competition, which was a competition for graduate students to explain the topic of their thesis for lay people in 3 minutes or less.  I, along with 25 other people, were chosen out of the 100 applicants across the university based on our abstracts to take part in this competition.  We were given a chance to use one slide to assist us in our explanation.  We sat through two hours of three minute presentations, mostly science and engineering who tried to explain their very complicated topics in three minutes using complicated multi-transitional slides.  So came my turn.  I went up and put on my one stable page: a page filled with covers of some of the books by Iranian writers. Unlike the other people who I had seen earlier in the hall nervously preparing I didn’t prepare much but got up and simply said the following:

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, millions of Iranians have been dissipated across the world, forming one of the biggest diasporic communities in the globe.   Over the years, many have begun recounting their experiences as migrants through fiction and memoirs.  Recently, after the events of 9/11, the popularity and interest in these books has skyrocketed, and nearly a hundred books have been published by Iranian writers in the last eight years, each claiming to be the insider into this mysterious world.

Images like the ones you see here have become automatically associated with a tales of the lives of people in Iran.   ( I pointed to the page filled with cover pages of books by Iranians all of which portrayed a woman’s picture.)

But, what are these texts doing, under the covers? Aside from the clichéd covers, which have become marketing scams to attract readers, these are narrating the Iranian experience for the world and they have been instrumental in forming the way Iran is viewed across the globe.  As works of expression coming from Iran, they have also been a major contributor to a new literary discourse in the wider arena of world literatures in English.

Yet, despite their serious contributions, both to the way Iran is seen abroad and to world literatures in English, everyone seems to have been caught up with the covers.  Aside from a few articles here and there, they have received very little literary merit for their contributions.

For the first time since their emergence, my thesis systematically acknowledges the significance of some of these works in relation to the diasporic Iranian experience.  It contextualizes and analyses the way these books are received as forming the Iranian experience for West; and it recognizes these works in the wider context of world literatures in English as an emerging phenomena as significant as Indian and African writing in English.

I finished in around two minutes and sat back down.  I didn’t think I did that great, but I could see a strange curiosity in the eyes of those around me.  Well done, very interesting topic, good job, people murmured to me as I sat down again.  Although I didn’t win the competition, I was very close to being picked as the runner up—the judges were impressed by the images, ‘just the image tells us so much, you didn’t need to explain or say much.,’—but they picked someone else.  But I felt like a winner in another way that day.  While waiting for the results to be announced, people came up to me and asked me things about Iran.  An Iranian guy in optometry came up and said that what I am doing is very valuable in introducing the Iranian culture to the world.  The seed of the blog idea began to germinate.

The third and final encounter that sealed in the blog idea in my head was a week after that event, at a graduate symposium at my university themed Crisis.  I presented a paper on the crisis of historical representation for the diasporic Iranian writers.  But I was very lucky to be in a panel with Nazzanin, a young and talented Iranian girl who is researching blogging in Iran, and to have Michelle Langford, a wonderful woman and a lecturer and avid fan of Iranian cinema, as the chair to my panel.  After the symposium, as I spoke to Nazzanin and Michelle and everyone else who was there, I realized that a blog is imminent in sharing and cross-posting ideas.

And so here I am.

Although I have written a lot, this would constitute as my first public engagement and I do hope that the world finds my post insightful and worth their time to read.