A good book to read that relates to this is “Black Faces, White Masks” by Franz Fenon.

Debashi may have been a bit extreme, but I applaud him for speaking out. Azar’s book (perhaps unintentionally) created a very ‘uncivilized’ and ‘barbaric’ Orientalist view of Iran (completely ignoring it’s History and the European involvement — such as overthrowing Mossadeq and installing the puppet Shah).

It’s a weird concept, I think – if you have connections to somewhere, that means you must like everything to do with that place. I love Louisiana to bits, but Southern literature is SO MUCH not my thing. I had a professor in college who tried to talk me out of this, but really, it’s ridiculous to try to argue someone out of what they like or don’t like.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is lovely to read – I’m afraid I haven’t emphasized this enough! I loved “listening in” on her class’s discussions of the literature they were studying. Whatever she thinks about the US and Iran and all that, her love of the books is obvious. And I love them too, so there is a feeling of connection for me.

This is something I’ve been telling people over and over again. I’ve had a few friends get actually angry at me because since my late teens or so I haven’t been reading all that much literature from my own country. This has to do with the fact that I love fantasy, and we don’t really have a fantasy literary tradition (though we do have some lovely Moorish fairy tales). Attempts to create one after the Harry Potter/LOTR movies craze resulted in Tolkien rewrites by eighteen-year-olds being published, which is not exactly the kind of stuff I want to read. People sometimes hold this against me, but I don’t see how my taste in literature automatically makes me a Victim of Cultural Imperialism.

Anyway…rant over 😛 I want to know more about Iran, so I’ll read this for sure. I’ll keep in mind that it’s not the whole story, though.

I was the exact same way. Until I read Dabashi’s v. snarky comments about Azar Nafisi that he makes every opportunity he gets, it never really occurred to me to wonder what was being left out (if anything). However, now I have caught Iranian history obsession like it’s the swine flu, so I have been thinking about Iranian politics a lot more. America has its flaws, but when I read about countries with governments like this, I am so thankful to live in a country where we have so much freedom. Seriously, reading these books, I just can’t get over how much freedom we have here. Crazy.

Well, I agree with you of course – their story and voice are the most important things! But I’m just imagining if someone had written a memoir about Katrina that implied that New Orleans was all better now. That’s the closest parallel I can think of to Dabashi’s gripe with Nafisi – he’s angry because she’s saying what (he thinks) the country wants to hear, and (he thinks) providing a justification for the country to carry on with its hostile policies towards Iran. If someone were to write a book that implied what I know many people would prefer to think about post-Katrina New Orleans – that it’s essentially all better and the people who are still struggling are just whiners looking for more government handouts – that might be their experience but I would consider it insulting, untrue, and harmful to the situation. And I would wonder why they were saying something so obviously false about Louisiana, and political expediency might be something that would occur to me, particularly if they had close ties with FEMA as (Dabashi claims) Nafisi has with American neocons.

That isn’t a very good parallel! But I’ve just been thinking a lot about it. When there’s a difficult situation whose successful resolution is deeply, personally important to you, I can see how it would be really frustrating to have someone espouse an easier-to-swallow (but simplistic) view, and then have it be super duper popular in book clubs all over the country.

I don’t believe memoirists/non-ficiton writers/or any writers, really, should tailor what they write to political climate. Doing so puts them at risk for losing an element of truth or honesty, or obscuring their voice.