Merritt-Hawkes’ Becoming-Persian in Persia: Romance and Reality

Abstract

Merritt-Hawkes’ much-neglected travel narrative, Persia: Romance and Reality, offers a very interesting account of her journey to Persia in 1935 and of her interactions with Persian women. Unlike her male counterparts, she is allowed entry in to Persian domestic spaces, which has proved productive in her active engagements with and opening up to the women. Drawing on a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework with a focus on the concepts of assemblage, lines, territory and becoming, this study fleshes out Merritt-Hawkes’ responses to the Persians and their culture. It argues that Merritt-Hawkes goes on a process of becoming-Persian through inventing her lines of flight from the rigid majoritarian codes prescribed by home for translating the encountered difference. Engaging with the Persian women in the contact zone, she revisits, questions and even ruptures home’s hierarchical spatial and power frameworks determining relationships between the majority/self and the minority/other. She surpasses the barriers set by racial, national and cultural determinants which hamper her interactions with the Persian women; adopting Persian women’s viewing position, she betrays home by indicating receptivity to and recognizing the encountered different cultural traits as diversity. Merritt-Hawkes appears as a writer of flight and of becoming who makes interventions in home’s patriarchal Orientalist tradition by offering an alternative outlook to difference in her revisionist take.