Another Country (Page 5)

The exiled writer thus faces an additional crisis of loyalty: how to be rigorous in one's political observations of Iran and true to one's own experience in the telling, even if one's testimony risks being presented as evidence in a distinctly nonliterary forum, such as a campaign to wage sanctions or war. The authors Azar Nafisi, Marjane Satrapi and Roya Hakakian each lived through the revolution, so they take this risk when, in their memoirs, they depict the horrors of that chapter in Iran's recent history. Nafisi, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies who has advised US policy-makers on Iran, told the New York Times last year that some Iranians criticized her "for washing our dirty laundry in front of the enemy." For her part, Moaveni concludes Lipstick Jihad with a firm clarification: For all their complaints, Iranians, in her view, do not need or want US intervention.

The "dirty laundry" problem calls to mind another story about Iran that outraged Iranian-Americans. In 1991 MGM produced Not Without My Daughter, a film that infuriated Iranian-Americans with its ugly portrayal of Iranian family life. Sally Field played an American woman whose Iranian husband whisks her away to Iran for a holiday. Upon arrival, he turns abusive and announces they are not leaving. Field's character undertakes a sensational escape through the mountains with her child, and finds salvation at the US Embassy in Turkey. The film arrived in theaters at a moment when there was little popular attention paid to Iran in the United States, so the combined force of stereotyping and Hollywood influence made it a symbol, for Iranian-Americans, of the extent to which Iran was misunderstood. If there was even a trace of truth in the film's portrayal of gender relations and judicial absurdity (after all, it was based on a true story), we rejected this in favor of prideful defensiveness. If any single cultural product plunged Iranian-Americans deeper into the protective hold of nostalgia, it was Not Without My Daughter.

I remember distinctly the feeling that filled our family station wagon as we drove home from viewing that movie so many years ago; something had been corrupted. It was an unexpected and painful rejection from the country we'd done so well at fitting into. That's why I was surprised to find myself delighted when I turned a page in Lipstick Jihad and discovered the final chapter heading: "Not Without My Mimosa." In one line, Moaveni takes the story back. At the end of her book, she is not debating how to get back to the United States, like Sally Field was in the film; she is merely wondering which of her New York City lifestyle choices she could stand to sacrifice if she were to stay in Iran. In a way, Moaveni's combination of irreverence and introspection is what makes her sound uniquely American. And yet as I read her cutting remarks and laughed out loud, I wondered whether I'd bristle at reading the same remarks from a non-Iranian. Probably. And do non-Iranians think Moaveni's book is funny? On a recent evening, the author read from Lipstick Jihad at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, and the crowd's response suggested that they did not. She ridiculed the sexual exploits of young Iranians, called Ramadan "one long rehab program" and described walking alongside her defiantly unveiled aunt as equivalent to accompanying a topless woman--a "head-breast." Although the room was packed, awkward silence came where giggles were due. And I wondered if America was ready, yet, to laugh at the Islamic Republic. Iran chic is one thing--a kind of sincere curiosity extended to compensate for ignorance or fear. But mockery, the kind we freely practice toward our good friends the French, the British and of course the Canadians, is a stage in our diplomatic relations with Iran that lies far off in the future.

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