Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora [Paperback]

Zohreh Sullivan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2001

"I feel I am the wandering Jew who has no place to which she belongs. I thought I could settle down, but can't imagine staying. Whenever I bought a bar of soap and two came in the package, I thought there would be no need to buy a package of two because I would never last through the second. Why? Because I knew I was returning to Iran - tomorrow. So too, I would buy the smallest size toothpastes and jars of oil. Putting down roots here is an impossibility." These are the words of one Iranian emigre, driven from Tehran by the revolution of 1979. They are echoed time and again in this powerful portrayal of loss and survival. Impelled by these words and her own concerns about nationality and identity, Zohreh Sullivan has gathered together here the voices of sixty exiles and emigres. They come from various ethnic and religious backgrounds and range in age from thirteen to eighty-eight. Although most are from the middle class, they work in a variety of occupations in the United States. But whatever their differences, here they are all engaged in remembering the past, producing a discourse about their lives, and negotiating the troubled transitions from one culture to another. Unlike many other Iranian oral history projects, "Exiled Memories" looks at the reconstruction of memory and identity through diasporic narratives, through a focus on the Americas rather than on Iran. The narratives included here reveal the complex ways in which events and places transform identities, how overnight radicals become conservatives, friends become enemies, the strong become weak. Indeed, the narratives themselves serve this function - serving to transfer or transform power and establish credibility. They reveal a diverse group of people in the process of knitting the story of themselves with the story of the collective after it has been torn apart. Author note: Zohreh T. Sullivan is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of "Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling" and editor of the Norton edition of "Kipling's Kim".

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Another underrepresented and often misrepresented community, now a part of the United States of America, has been given voice and songs... This book often brought tears to my eyes and turned on bright lights of insight in my head..." - Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies

From the Publisher

A moving portrait of the Iranian émigré community grappling with life in the U.S. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 289 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press (January 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566398436
• ISBN-13: 978-1566398435
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,751,894 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saving Private Memories, July 5, 2001

By 

bahareh (Tehran, Iran) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora (Paperback)

Ethongraphy, Anthology, Short Stories, Interviews, whatever you call it, this book is full of splendid information; the kind of information that was about to get lost in time. There are first hand experiences from the ones who strengthened the revolution but were disappointed and betrayed by it.

5.0 out of 5 stars A SERIES OF INTERVIEWS WITH POST-IRANIAN REVOLUTION EMIGRES, December 14, 2010

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora (Paperback)

Zohreh T. Sullivan is Emeritus Professor of English and African Studies at the University of Illinois. This 2001 book consists of interviews of Iranians who left Iran after the Iranian Revolution.

She writes in the Preface, "My book is conceptually different from empirical sociological studies of Iranians in America ... It speaks to the reconstruction of memory and identity through diasporic narratives, to the conjuncture of the Americas and not to Iran itself... This book makes modest claims. It does not intend 'truths' about Iranians, exiles, or Iranian culture... The narratives that follow are intended ... to illuminate difference and relationality that open up new worlds of local knowledge... The stories included in this book show how one accidentally chosen group of Iranians in the United States remembers the past, produces a discourse about their lives, and negotiates the troubled transitions from one culture to another after the revolution."

Here are some other quotations from the book:

"The Islamic Republic crushed the autonomist movement in Kurdistan with bombs, massacres, and more imprisonments." (Pg. 97)
"In those (pre-revolution) days, we believed in literacy for women; we believed that literacy would create better mothers; we believed that our work in literacy would make better housewives, better workers in the factories, and better citizens. The people we reached were willing to send their daughters and wives to literacy classes. But then, after the revolution, these people were told that they should not send their women to classes where men were teaching." (Pg. 143)
"The extermination of the Bahai's by the Islamic Republic is another chapter in a long history of persecution and denial of the inherent contradiction between the claim that discrimination against minorities is anti-Islamic and the insistence that all Muslims are one nation in danger of being weakened by ethnic fragmentations. And this is in a country in which religious and ethnic minorities constitute some 53 percent of the population." (Pg. 177-178)