Nana Asfour has, in Bookforum, a worth-reading article on Iranian-American women novelists. She makes the point that the fact that those writers are exiled makes them in fact less able than Iranian women still living in Iran to write about present-day Iran in their novels. I am not sure that I agree with Asfour because I think that sometimes exile gives people the required distance to desacralize their homeland in order not only to write about it, but to dare to deconstruct or re-imagine it through fiction. Sugary excerpt:
Regardless of how much or how little Iranian parents reflect on the loss of their homeland, that sense of loss is inevitably transferred to their children. These novels are the product of the children of the immigrant generation; Iran continues to both define and elude them, and fiction provides a vehicle to explore that distant and tumultuous country. Contemporary Iran in particular remains elusive. For those writers based in America, it is a recent history they have not experienced. For now, the task of chronicling present-day Iran is left to the novelists who reside there. (Emphasis added)
[…] Iranian writers, unhindered by censorship and persecution in the United States, are seeking to define themselves, as well as the meaning of their national identity. As Nahai has noted in regard to the sudden proliferation of books on Iran in America, “Iranian women are writing, I imagine, because they live in a place and at a time when they can speak the truth without fear of morbid consequences,” adding, “I think exile has been so good for Iranians, especially for the women.” The late Edward Said, himself an émigré, reflected that “in the United States, academic, intellectual and aesthetic thought is what it is today because of refugees from fascism, communism and other regimes given to the oppression and expulsion of dissidents.” And yet, while expatriate fiction has been for the most part the domain of male writers (Nabokov, Huxley, Auden, and so on), this wave of Iranian women writers is charting a new literary voice—one by women and, for the most part, about women.
