Corrective (?) Lenses

I'd like to take a moment to discuss something about the literature we've been reading. We're all here trying to get an idea of other cultures through literature. But I think we're facing a little bit of a wall. I have enjoyed almost all of what we have read and watched, I think that it is all valid and useful. I am glad to have read and seen all that I have.

I do, however, sometimes feel as if we are leaving out of our conversation voices that are even more underrepresented in our culture than those we have been reading. Indeed, voices which are underrepresented in their own cultures.

For instance, we read an excerpt from Fatemeh Keshavarz's Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. We should remember that Keshavarz left Iran in 1979, before the Islamic leadership and laws began. She was educated in the West, she lives and works in the United States. She claims to be an average Iranian, but seems to be upper-middle class. Even just middle class puts her far above most people.

We read Marjane Satrapi's wonderful Persepolis. While the book is engaging, well written, and only talks about Satrapi's personal experience, much of it - her formative teenage years - occurs outside of Iran. Even the end of the book tells us that she will again leave her homeland and live abroad. Today she lives in Paris, France. Persepolis makes it clear that its author was raised in a relatively privileged way. Her parents had money (they can afford to send her to a French school, send her abroad, continuously bail her out of jail, they have a maid).

We never see the perspective of the poor or of those who agree with the Islamic government in Iran.

Rooftops of Tehran, by Mahbod Seraji, is another wonderful book. It takes place in the mid 1970s, when its author was indeed living in Iran. But Seraji was educated and has lived in the United States since 1976. He has since visited Iran, but has not lived there. His memories of the culture and people are decades along.

I would like to read something written in, say, the 1980s or 1990s by someone living in Iran. Fiction or nonfiction, I think the representation would be vastly different.

Likewise, both of the books I read for Iraq were written by U.S. authors. While the books were engaging, especially for high school students, the perspective is uniquely American. Sunrise Over Fallujah discussed its protagonist's feelings on the Iraqi people (that they're really just like Americans, that all people are really mostly the same: good and bad, loving and proud). But I didn't get any perspective of real Iraqi people. Nothing to tell me first hand what life in Iraq is like, how war affects families, what dinnertime is like.

My goal here is not to lampoon the work we've done and the books we've read. It's simply to ask us all to keep searching and always remember that our perspectives are shaped by the information we choose to take in. We have discussed how we are somewhat beholden to publishers and their translation choices. Remember that people in other countries know of us what their publishers choose to translate.