The Perils and Seductions of Home: Return Narratives of the Iranian Diaspora

Abstract

To an increasing number of critics, meanwhile, the popularity of books by Iranian women in America, particularly memoirs, constitutes a pernicious outcome of contemporary military campaigns in the Middle East: a restaging of Orientalist and imperialist ideologies by a cadre of native informers. 1 approach here three such memoirs-Gelareh Asayesh's Saffron Sky (1999), Tara Bahrampour's To see and see Again (1999), and Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad (2005)-in terms of Cherrie Moraga's idea of "patria" (or homeland) as a "distorting mirror" for the returning immigrant.2 The authors of these return narratives are frequently caught between two extremes: a native culture which has traditionally sanctioned neither women's freedom to travel nor women's autobiographical writing, and an adopted culture with an insatiable curiosity for both the intimate details of their lives and descriptions of forbidden and alien landscape.3 This essay considers how the traffic between Iran and America distorts the immigrant's ideas about gender, culture, and ethnicity, and how the act of recounting such traffic, in turn, distorts principal conventions of western travel literature.