Wanting more out of life

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

How do you define your alienation from present-day Iran?

As a deep distrust of the theocratic regime. As the keen satisfaction of never having supported Khomeini and his revolution. Memories of that other Iran, the one that’s thick with culture and art is a source of pride for me. You have to understand that Iran for me is a place where I grew up, but with which I haven’t been able to form an adult relationship. Having said that, one is faithful to the food one was brought up on, and that in a way constitutes patriotism. I've madly craved Persian cuisine on occasion, and those who know me, also know that on those occasions nothing can stop me from getting a bellyful of Basmati rice, or Ash, or Kashk-e Baudemjune. I'm loyal to the country of my parents, but not strongly enough to want to go back and live there. I've spent almost all my adult life in America; going back to Iran would be impossible since the Iran that I knew no longer exists. However, I'll never achieve a 100 percent American identity, either. While it is exhilarating not to belong to a fixed spot on the map, it's a disappointing experience not feeling oneself in the center of something. There are so many things which I cannot say to an American friend with any hope of being understood. Therefore, I write, hoping that some of what has gone into my making will come across, and people will be able to make some sort of sense out of it.

Do you think in English, or do you translate your thoughts from Persian?

Often I have been asked the question whether I translate my thoughts into English. The answer to this question is by no means a simple one. Nabokov once said that we do not think in words but in images. I cannot say this is a universal truth, because I know people who disagree with it. However, thought is as often pictorial or purely emblematic as verbal; a writer's vocabulary is not made up of just words, but images, incidents, situations, smells, tunes, characters. I can't think of anything without imagining it, without giving it shape in my mind's eye and ear.

I lived my childhood in a different culture, speaking a different language. The things that I experienced in my childhood are defined, tagged and classified in Persian. For them I have had to find proper substitutes in English. Conversely, the things that I experienced in my adult life are defined, tagged and classified in English; I have no name for the majority of them in Persian. The Persian language has a lot of shame incorporated in its character. I cannot swear in Persian as easily as I do in English. It's a language of repressive respectfulness. Therefore, a lot of times I cannot speak about my feelings in Persian, either. Nahid Rachlin has written about this much more eloquently than me.

What is your relationship to America?

I grew up with American foreignness deep inside my soul, knowing the Marx Brothers, Superman, X-man, Mickey Mouse, Batman, the stories of the Civil War, the Depression, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. All this gets high marks in the geographical entity known as Iran. I recited American poets and read American novels; listened to Rock and Roll and Bob Dylan and Donna Summer as I fell in love, for the first time, in the Summer of ‘75. I have danced to America, cried with America, and even when I fantasized about the outcome of the impending revolution, I admired America, not just because I had woven its music into my love affairs and not because I had incorporated its world into my dreams, but for what it once symbolized in my mind—for the impossible idealism of the American forefathers, the freedom fighters of the War of Independence. It was through its charm and expertise that America conquered us, and impressed us with jokes and Hollywood movies, and books, yes novels of Stowe, Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Updike. As an alternative to the old world, America hasn't let anyone down, I don't think.

Obviously America hasn't let you down. Have you been successful?

Success means different things to different people. The publication of my novel gives me joy—for having lived forty odd years not quite in vain—and yet no long-term satisfaction because there is a long road ahead.