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JOURNEY FROM THE LAND OF NO: A GIRLHOOD CAUGHT IN REVOLUTIONARY IRAN, BY ROYA HAKAKIAN, NEW YORK: THREE RIVERS PRESS, 2005
LIPSTICK JIHAD: A MEMOIR OF GROWING UP IRANIAN IN AMERICA AND AMERICAN IN IRAN, BY AZADEH MOAVENI, NEW YORK: RANDOM HOUSE, 2005
EMBROIDERIES, BY MARJANE SATRAPI, NEW YORK: PANTHEON, 2004
Until recently, we had to get sizeable grants, plead, or to pull strings to get mainstream publishers to take a cursory look at any manuscript from or about Iran. This is fortunately no longer so, in the case of memoirs. (The old routine still applies for novels, short stories, poetry, and scholarly works.) These days, memoirs are to the publishing industry what reality shows are to television. They have taken over the cultural landscape for bizarre reasons and are making loads of money.
Several memoirs written by Iranian women have been picked up by mainstream publishers and have found a large audience among general readers. This is not surprising for several reasons. First, with the daily reminders of the current U.S. entanglements in the Middle East, Iran's proximity to the fiasco in Iraq and to the instability in Afghanistan, its exclusive placement in the "axis of evil," and the current "Nuclear Issue," Iran is a journalistic hot spot. Contradictory news from inside Iran continues to fascinate and repel. Not a day goes by without an outrageous, inflammatory remark by the recently elected hard-liner President Ahmadinejad, while student activism, the quiet revolt of writers, journalists, and intellectuals and the hourly, daily, yearly resistance of women continues. Bloggers keep blogging, journals that are closed down get published under different names, and crowded cafés and restaurants reveal the latest fashion challenge to the Islamic dress rule. Iran is a thriving, interesting country, full of contradictions.
Second, the ideological intransigence of the current regimes in both Iran and the United States, their preference for rhetoric based on faith rather than reason, and the grandstanding on both sides, does not render understanding the complex disputes or reaching possible solutions any easier. Note the similarity in their choices of words and imagery: President Bush places Iran in the "axis ot evil" while the term the "Great Satan" continues to be bandied about in Iran. As Azadeli Moaveni puts it, axis...