09 February 2009

Writing from a Complex Ethnic Perspective

Poet and editor Persis M. Karim finds a rich resource in her Persian roots.

By Persis M. Karim

Born in the United States, Persis M. Karim is a poet and editor of the anthology Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006). She is co-editor and co-author of A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans (1999), and she currently is associate professor of English and comparative literature at San Jose State University in San Jose, California.

A distinctive aspect of being an American is that it literally puts you in contact with the world. As a child of post-World War II immigrants, I grew up feeling that the United States was a place of opportunity and refuge, and that for my parents, the choice to become American meant both privilege and responsibility. For my father, an Iranian who saw dramatic changes in his country as a result of the discovery of oil and the politics of the Cold War, coming to the United States represented an opportunity to remake and reinvent his individual possibilities and goals. After living through the occupation of Iran by Soviet and British troops during the war, he thought a great deal about what would become of Iran and of his own life. As a young man, he read about the American democratic ideals embodied in the U.S. Constitution and the idea that America, conceptually, was a destination for people who felt limited by the politics of nation-states that were emerging from the yoke of imperial and colonial control. For my mother, an immigrant who experienced the ravages of war and occupation in France, the United States was a place to reencounter the glimpses of spirited American values she observed among U.S. soldiers while teaching French to them in the latter part of the war. For both of my parents, America had a dream-like allure that allowed them to begin their lives anew. They came here partly by accident, but their intentions to stay and become Americans were very deliberate.

I was raised in northern California in a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon suburb with a complicated sense of my own identity. Unconsciously, I tried to assume a Californian and American identity. But early in my life, I felt a strong sense of my difference. My family was not surrounded by an Iranian or a French community or by our relatives, but still I felt ethnically marked. Perhaps it was my name, my looks, the food we ate (lots of rice and lamb), or perhaps, it was my own decidedly strong attraction to notions of “the other” that became more enhanced as I became more aware of the news of the world. The Vietnam War first alerted me to the world outside the United States, but it was the events that followed it that thrust me into a greater awareness of my Iranian-American identity.

During the 1970s, when the United States began to play a more active and visible role in the politics of the Middle East, my curiosity about Iran became more acute. By the time I entered middle school, Iran was a major preoccupation of U.S. foreign policy. My father, already disillusioned by the U.S.-sponsored coup d’etat in 1953 of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, had begun during my adolescence to be more vocal and critical of the U.S. role in his country of origin. Although I had no distinctive political views and only a limited understanding of Iran, I began to ask questions about what it meant to be an American. Around the time of the U.S. hostage crisis and the eruption of the Iranian revolution in 1979, I began my own exploration into my father’s heritage and, increasingly, felt a need to understand and explore this part of my heritage.

For me, literature and writing provided the most important window into my Iranian heritage. As a child, my father shared with me his passion for poetry. He read aloud in Persian and English the works of the great Persian poets Hafez, Rumi, and Khayyam, as well as British and European poets like Baudelaire, Shelley, and Shakespeare. His love of literature and reading was infectious, and it became the most important way for me to satisfy my growing curiosity about Iran and Iranian culture. At the time, Iran was in turmoil, and the U.S. media consistently represented it and its people in harsh and negative ways. Even popular culture was unkind to the Middle East. My teen years were marked by the common epithet “Camel Jockey” and the hit AM radio song “Ahab the A-rab.” As a young adult, I found myself wanting to defend my father’s country and his people against accusations of being “extremist, terrorist, hostage-takers.” At school, on city streets, and on the TV news, people around me were chanting “Bomb Iran” and “Iranians Go Home!” 

At home I listened to my father’s astute and more complex analysis of the political events unfolding in Tehran. I began to understand that events taking place there were as much the result of problems created by my country, the United States, as they were the result of the few extremists who took Americans hostage at the U.S. embassy. These events and the overly simplistic images of Iran in the media made me even more curious about what was taking place in that nation. Rather than shrinking from the anger and hostility expressed toward the immigrant Iranian community, I became more serious and committed to learning about Iran and my Iranian identity. Throughout my learning, then and now, I always return to literature and the power of representation that it bestows on the writer. Slowly, I began to feel the emergence of a first-person ownership of my mixed-blood, immigrant heritage. I was compelled then by the idea of writing “our” narrative, telling “our” own story. It became a kind of mission for me to help narrate the story of the Iranian immigrant community in the United States that continued to grow as the events of the revolution, the hostage crisis, and the Iran/Iraq War played out, and as the increasingly negative iconography of Iran became cemented in the American mind-set. I set out on a journey to claim some of my Iranianness, by exploring the ways that Iran and Iranian culture had influenced me as a writer and as a citizen of the United States.

As a writer, I began to see the value — even the advantage — of expressing the complex and nuanced features of my not-entirely American background. I wanted to harness and develop a perspective and voice as a writer that was part of the particular time in which I grew up. I also wanted to write about all the many ways that my heritage and difference helped me and thrust me into a process of self-definition that could only be possible in the United States, a place where defining oneself is not a static proclamation but rather a dynamic process continually influenced by the larger political and cultural dialogues that are part of the surrounding frame of one’s American life. It has taken some time for American readers to appreciate the complexities, hardships, and beauty of the Iranian immigrant experience — and the body of literature that now describes that experience. A young but flourishing literature of the Iranian Diaspora has finally taken hold. This Iranian-American literary sensibility is attenuated by the sense of loss and displacement by the first generation of Iranian immigrants, but also by an appreciation for what immigration has made possible for the emerging second generation. Iranian-Americans have an acute appreciation of free speech and the opportunity to create a new literary culture that includes the voices of writers who have historically been excluded or minimized in the tradition of letters in Iran; those include the voices of women, of religious and cultural minorities, and of political dissidents.

On my own journey as a writer, I have attempted to find and connect the threads of my complex heritage. I have drawn on the richness of my parents’ journey to the United States, one of the countless unintended, coincidental results of the Second World War. It was a war that altered the directions of governments in every geographic and political corner of the globe, but it also rippled on and on to affect the lives of millions of individuals, ultimately leading my parents from their homes to the same dance hall in Chicago at a time that presented a great sense of hope and opportunity to them both. As a writer, I draw heavily on the idea that children of immigrants must narrate something of their own story, as children born on this continent but also as people who come from another. My own opportunities to express myself have been greatly influenced by the belief I have about what it is to be an American writer. I am cognizant that one cannot live in the United States and ignore the problematic or beneficial ways that this nation influences so much of the world with its cultural and political power. And yet I am also aware that we must continuously draw on the notion that we are a very young country, deeply involved with our own sense of becoming. In such a context, to write from one’s heritage is only a beginning. I would like to believe that my father’s and my mother’s stories took hold in me and gave me the impetus to narrate something of the challenging trajectory of their lives, but that my role as a writer is to move past their stories, past whatever ethnic heritage I inherited to make something new.

I consider what I am doing — as a writer, poet, and editor — to be the ultimate expression of my hybrid American identity. I write about what I am becoming through the accidents of history and the accidents of my parents’ lives, but my writing also contemplates and engages the sense of dynamism and possibility that is essential to our American character. That character is the glue that holds this country to some sense of social unity, but it also creates the fissures that allow new perspectives and voices to enter and creep from the margins to the center. While my work is not always consciously driven by the presence of these fissures, they are an absolute necessity that underpins what is best about claiming my American and my hyphenated American identity.