Look at the representation: a handful of critically acclaimed darlings have their trauma-porn autofiction elevated to the cultural stratosphere. The native informant gets her loot, that’s the bargain. In these works, you don’t always see the heroine physically shrinking, but the element of becoming less is pervasive. Her agency is always stripped in some way, even in self-inflicted ways. Her personhood is diminished. The West likes to read about Iranian women who lose a part of their innate humanity.
That sounds very abstract, so let me be more specific. Satrapi’s heroine in Persepolis. Djavadi’s in Disoriental. The comedy that is Reading Lolita in Tehran (just thinking about it makes me cackle). It is not enough that they really want narratives where the Islamic Republic inherently encroaches on female personhood (that is the main requirement to get published), they want this trend to continue in emigration: so, you must become miserable, you must become addicted, or anorexic, you must lose whatever sliver of agency you had and become, in a way, less than human. Then you are granted conditional humanity.
Iranian “authors” in emigration keep screeching about a double-bind: if they write what is publishable, writers like me (and hundreds of us in the motherland) will pry their little autofiction porno apart. If they write the truth, it simply won’t see the light of day. Either way, they lose. There is another type, the “conscious aristocrat” who, having found out that musings about their grandma’s diamonds and upbringing in a palace with a corps de ballet of totally silent servant girls aren’t popular, will start writing the same shit with a transparent veneer of preemptive self-flagellation. What is the common denominator? The woman must be small, must be powerless and oh, she must suffer. She must suffer so much the Western salivary glands activate. When they hear the drip-drip-drip, it’s no longer salivation, it’s money trickling into their bank account.
And here we return to the same stupid smallness. You know, in the ur-suffering-woman narrative, the heroine is so overcome with mental anguish she stops eating and delicately fades away, like some consumptive West Asian Violetta Valery. Rich, coming from me, isn’t it? Well, let me tell you, I ate myself alive. I didn’t lie on an ottoman, now pale and even more racially ambiguous, limp wrist and all, waiting for some white, long-suffering man to set me free from the prison of my traumatic past, no, I freaking cycled. A lot. Incessantly. And I cleaned, obsessively. And I raged. I got into physical confrontations. I yelled curses. I smashed plates. I let the fire burn me from the inside because my world was burning and nobody gave enough shits to make it stop. Can I read about such wasting? No. It’s not pretty.
Even further? Can I read about an Iranian woman who gets angry and FAT? Who eats her rage and swells and takes up space and becomes more of herself, not less? Can I read about an Iranian woman who, imagine, doesn’t become a carbon copy of so-called princess Leila? No, I can’t, because Iranian women aren’t allowed to be fat, or old or ugly or angry or uninteresting or poor. It’s simply against the rules, you see. Because if you become these things the bargain of your conditional humanity instantly expires.
Meanwhile, actual Iranian men are never granted conditional humanity, so they have to really put in some elbow grease if they want that sweet, sweet proximity to whiteness. They essentially have two choices, either accept that they will be consistently dehumanized, or turn into caricatures. There are several brands of clowning associated with the second choice: the very smart™ caviar gauche leftist, the monarchist nostalgist, the tryhard crypto-fascist. The more outlandish the ideology, the higher chance he will be performatively accepted as the “quirky guy”, and still mocked relentlessly behind his back. And the first choice? First choice leads to reduced economic opportunities in emigration, harrassment, and social isolation. Fun! I really wouldn’t wish to be an Iranian man in Europe, I can tell you that.
For the Iranian woman in emigration, the path towards conditional humanity is pretty straightforward. I can tell you about numerous experiences where these nice NGO aunties come to me at social functions, and just offer me opportunities, because someone had just pointed to me as the token Iranian woman. And look at me! So small and gaunt, poor thing. Surely, I can be helped. Surely, if only I don’t run my giant mouth. But I do run it. And then the house of cards collapses. I say things I shouldn’t say; I use words like “hegemony”, “imperialism”, “unequal exchange”, “Geneva convention article 33”, “collective punishment”, “sanctions”, “overcompliance”, “maternal mortality”, “unequal sanction burden” etc. And let me tell you, the good humanitarian NGO aunties really, really do not like that.
