Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran is a thoughtful and refreshing response to the growing corpus of books popular in America and Europe about the oppression of Muslim women. Fatemeh Keshavarz writes,The emerging Orientalist narrative has many similarities to and a few differences from this earlier incarnation. It equally simplifies its subject. For example, it explains almost all undesireable Middle Eastern incidents in terms of Muslim men's submission to God and Muslim women's submission to men... The emerging narrative... might have a native -- or seminative -- insider tone... Yet it replicates the earlier narrative's strong under current of superiority and of impatience with the locals, who are often portrayed as uncomplicated.
The collection of essays in Jasmine and Stars explores some of that complexity in the case of Iran, introducing a diversity of characters who violate or complicate Western stereotypes from the liberated feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad to classes of 9th grade girls as well as an elder unlettered farmers who memorizes her work.
Keshavarz particularly addresses Reading Lolita in Tehran and she mentions The Kite Runner as examples of this new Orientalism. As innovative as the Persepolis books and film are, these, too, perhaps in part because of the class position of the author and her removal from Iran at a relatively young age, replicate some of the same cliches.
2 comments:
I am hoping we can address in class Satrapi's social class. While I found Persepolis wonderful and engaging, I think the family's financial upper hand played a large role in the perspective of the author and her ability to have certain experiences (her family's ability, for instance, to routinely bail her out of jail during her university years).
I'm an Iranian who left Iran as an adult and I think that though Persepolis is a memoir and therefore shows Iran from the perspective of the author alone it is still an accurate depiction of a woman’s life in Iran. I have also read Reading Lolita in Tehran and I think the author has done a good job of explaining the encaged and repressed feelings women have in that country since the 1979 revolution. Sure not everyone is imprisoned and miserable, some may even like living under a religious fanatical regime, but most people are unhappy. The Islamic government has taken away the basic rights of all people, especially women, and that’s essentially what both Persepolis and Reading Lolita in Tehran are talking about. And yes, despite Keshavarz’s claim above, at the end of the day, it really is that simple! We should all have the freedom to exercise our basic human rights.
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