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Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora

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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.

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)