>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
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>> Joan Weeks: good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of all my colleagues, and particular Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb, who is Chief of the African and Middle East Division I'd like to welcome everyone. I'm Joan Weeks, I'm head of the Near East Section, the sponsor of today's program. And we're very pleased to present this titled Us and Them, breaking free from cultural branding and identity politics. Before we start today's program and introduce our speaker I'd like to give you a little bit of an overview about our collections, in the hopes that you'll come back and use them. The speaker today is writing about Iranian Americans. And I did a quick search in our catalogue and found 43 books on that topic. And some of them are in Persian and some of them are in English; so you're welcome to come back into our reading room and please use our collections for your future enjoyment and for the research. We are a custodial division and we build collections and serve these to researchers from around the globe. We cover over 78 countries and more than two dozen languages. The Africa section includes all the countries of Sub-Sahara Africa. And we're going to have a follow on program to this, so please stay if you can to hear our program on the conversations with Africa Poets that will immediately follow this program. And we also have the Hebraic section that covers Judaica and Hebraic worldwide and our Near East section covers all of the Arab countries, including North African, Turkey, Turkic Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan and the Muslims in Western China, Russia and the Balkans. So, it's a very extensive research collection area and just a few housekeeping items before we get started. We like to have you know that if you ask questions, this program is being videotaped, so implicitly you're getting, giving us permission to videotape you. And also we have fliers available if you're interested in our blog or Facebook, if you subscribe to the Facebook you'll hear about other future programs as well. So, without further ado though I'd like to invite my colleague Hirad Dinavari who is our Persian specialist, to introduce our speaker. Thank you.
>> Hirad Dinavari: Thank you everyone for coming on difficult traffic day from what I hear. It's wonderful to have our speaker here today; this would be her second book that she would be covering at LC. We love her so much with the first book that we've invited her for her new book, which is a very timely book on immigrants living over you know, in different countries essentially. I will do a short bio, although she really doesn't need a bio, she's well known. Ms. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani grew up in Uganda, was educated in the United Kingdom and then in the United States, and now lives in France. She is author of the Women who Read Too Much, which was a book on the poetess and woman leader if you like Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn 19th century icon, also she's written The Saddlebag. Her novels have been published in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Russian, Korean and Chinese. And I hope to this Persian and Arabic soon will be added as well. A nice quote from one of her books is "We abandon our true homeland when we cannot identify with others". I think that captures the essence of this talk and instead of me blabbing on; I would love to have Bahiyyih herself entice you with her wonderful wisdom and her welcome. Thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: It would have been fun to hear him blabbing on rather than me blabbing on. But I would first like to begin with all my gratitude to Mary-Jane Deeb, to the Near Eastern Section, African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, to Joan Weeks for her kind introduction and above all to dear Hirad for his generosity in maintaining correspondence with me, all through this last couple of years. I've been delighted to hear from him. I've given the title of Breaking Free From Cultural Branding. Because of something which happened last year in Britain and you have had your elections here and this is certainly not a political discussion, but it affected me deeply when I heard Teresa May saying in October last year that citizens of the world were citizens of nowhere. And it really struck me because she was speaking about a very particular elite who are well represented in capitals like Washington with the international institutions. I live in Strasburg where there are all also international elite if you like in Europe. And there is a kind of gap between such people and the ordinary people in the street, that is certainly the case. But I was thinking of all the billions of people who are not international elite, who also find themselves as citizens of the world. And to be told that you're a citizen of nowhere when you are a refugee, when you have gone through heroin conditions of war, of famine, of deprivation and finally find yourselves stripped of everything seemed to me to be the last gesture of ravage. It didn't seem fair. So, it occurred to me that one of the reasons why we're so worried about being labeled one way or another is because we are looking for labels and maybe people think that to be called a citizen of the world is a threat; so we try to undermine it. Because of the rise of nationalism that we see in the world today, because of the extremes and phobia, perhaps like in a previous age where anyone who seemed to be cosmopolitan, the word cosmopolitan became a slur in the 1930's. Cosmopolitanism became something like globalism and it was considered a threat to the nationalism of the times. I thought maybe we could look at the real meaning behind a citizen of the world and see it as an inclusive kind of identity, see it as a way of bringing people together rather than imposing wars between them. Citizens of the world and those of us that don't necessarily carry one name label, that have a brand which seems to be multiple, very often find ourselves sort of without a singular identity. And it seems that part of the reason I needed to write this book was because of the fracturing of identity that I've noticed in the Iranian diasporic community. We're not just one group of people, we're multiple. We seem to have identities that also reflect the cultures and the countries from which, in which we find new homes. So, I've set this story in a kind of ping pong world between the French Iranian World and the American Iranian World. And I follow the life of the old lady who has emerged from Iran, almost by accident really, not by desire. She had wanted to stay in her country which I think is the case for most refugees and migrants. It isn't an act necessarily of choice. And she finds herself rather like a benign King Lear bouncing between two daughters. Now my two daughters are certainly nothing like Goneril and Regan. They have every reason, and maybe Goneril and Regan did too, for having chips on their shoulders. But, we see their lives through the lives of the old lady. We see her through their eyes; so we're given a chance to look at the Iranian coming from Iran, from the point of view of the diasperin Iranian. And we looked at the Diasperin daughters from the point of view of the Iranian mother. Every since I started writing, people have called me an Iranian writer. And I don't see how I could possibly be called an Iranian writer if I grew up in East African. I don't see how I can also be called an Iranian writer if I'm not living in Iran talking about Iran today. I've written about Iran in the 19th century, which is not what Iran is now. And so I realized I had to write a story about what I knew, which was the experience of being outside Iran. ^M00:10:04 And not only outside from one perspective, but since I've lived in several countries myself and since I've met the Iranian Diaspera all over the place I wanted to capture something of that diversity, that fragmentation. The title, the cover of this book is interesting because it reflects broken glass. It reflects fractured glass; it reflects prisms of mirror or glass. They're not just giving you one image, but are giving you different facets of the image and of the light. And I'm particularly pleased with the cover because of an interesting quote that I discovered by James Joyce. As you know he had difficulty publishing Ulysses but he also had difficulty publishing Dubliners. And it took him something like nine years before the book came out. And in the process, in his frustration he wrote the following, now I've lost it, one second. Here we are. He wrote to his publisher saying "I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having a good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass". Now looking glass and mirrors are something that Iranians absolutely love, you can't go to an Iranian house without seeing reflections of yourself and everybody else on all sides. But I think particularly fragmented glass is something very intimately associated with Iranian culture. They have a way of making the most remarkable mosaics out of pieces of broken mirror. And I've often wondered whether they first have to break the mirror in order to make the mosaic, or whether there's so much shattered class all over the place that they have found creative ways of using it. But in any event broken mirrors, fractured mirrors, balls of broken glass reflecting refracted rays of light is a met of very close to the Iranian psyche I thought. And since I have no pretentions of writing a book that could retard the course of civilization if it was not read by the Iranians, I thought it best to present a fractured vision of this community. I've done it in several ways. One is because it's simply the subject matter is fractured. It's about a scattering of people all over the world. But I've also chosen a narrative structure which is reflecting that fragmentation. So, you will find in this story the threat of the lives of the mother and her two daughters, the King Lear threat, which I vaguely described. The story of the mother going from one country to the other meeting the French daughter, meeting the American daughter and her own experiences in between. And between the chapters which tell you the story of BB John and her daughter LiLi in Frane and her daughter Goli in America and her yearning and aching heart for her absent son who disappeared during the Iran/Iraq War as a young boy of 14 with the Keys of Paradise around his neck, Ali who has never been found, who has never been confirmed dead or alive. And who hovers all the way through this story as a sort of yearned for Messiah figure. A kind of promised, who may or may not ever come. He's dangling in the story all the way through; so BiBi, Goli, Deli -- oh Sorry, LiLi -- sorry I'll say it again. BiBi the mother, LiLi the French daughter, Goli the American daughter. Goli's daughter, Deli because the Persians absolutely love ending names in the family either with the same vowel or starting them with the same set of consonants. And Ali who is the absent son. Between the chapters that tell you the story of this somewhat dysfunctional family, I have fragmented images of Persians from all over the world. So, you go in and out of the story by meeting fragments of other Iranians in different countries all over the planet. And I explain why I've done that in the first chapter, which is called "Us". In this chapter, I define the meaning of that first personal plural narration. Who is the us that is taking us into these different chapters? And I start off by saying that we, we're waiting for this book to come out for quite some time. And it doesn't come out. We keep waiting for it, we keep looking for it, it doesn't come out. Who is going to write it? Well whoever, it is that writes it has to do so in the first person plural. The first person plural is mandatory in such situations. We use this point of view in Persian to show our modesty, to demonstrate our humility. At times it has to be admitted we also use it to evade responsibility, but that's another issue. And I wanted to clarify that so that you wouldn't think the we, was a royal we. And you wouldn't imagine that it was an editorial we. This is a very specifically Iranian we and we use the word "Mahi" in Persian to sort of disburse the ego. We say, "Oh we are so grateful that you were able to come. We are honored that you invited us". And it's a kind way in its purist form of showing humility, but it's also sometimes a wee bit hypocritical. And at times can be as I said a way of avoiding responsibility. We didn't know, we were only aware that we were -- so all the way through you can get fluctuations of this different versions of the we. And the other reason I did it, I did use this we was because and I'm so delighted to hear that there are 40 other books on the subject to the Iranian diaspera on your shelves. But maybe you can tell me whether I'm correct in saying "There was plenty of evidence of first person singular Iranians on the book shop shelves. But we were not the focus of attention. Subjective stories abounded in the chain stores, but these were not about the real we. They were about individuals we could barely identify with. A country that no longer existed, a past of aesthetic sensibility belonging to the academic few, or a place for the very rich, the very religious, the very feminist, or the anti-feminist, the anti-rich, the anti-religious. There were biographies of those associated with the peacock throne or conspiracy theories about the fall of Mossadegh, or the true confessions of those who still remembered oil in World War II and Hitler. Or, the fictional memoirs of pivotal figures of the constitutional revolution. But none of these stories actually were about the hydra-headed contradictory, paradoxical us. The multiple first person, plural us in Toronto and Sydney, in Bogota and Beijing speaking Persian all over the world". I decided that it was time to write about that paradoxical, contradictory multiple faceted us. And so in this book you're going to discover that us and one of the other reasons as a writer I felt a sort of urgency about writing in the first person plural was captured in the words  of, if I can find her, Aminatta Forna, a marvelous sierra laonian Scottish writer, don't know if you've come across her work.Sieranaonian wonderfully black and beautiful and Scottish, speaking English with a strong Scottish accent. And she wrote the following, "The way of literature", she writes, "Is to seek universality, writers try to reach beyond those things that divide us, culture, class, gender, race. Given the chance we would resist classification. I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, a gay writer, a black writer, an Asian writer or an African writer. We would prefer to simply be called writers", and i would add if one were able a human being, trying to write. That is the greatest accolade. And because I think writers have this capacity for universality and don't necessarily want to be branded. I decided to write a book about the suffocation of branding really. The impossibility of branding the free human spirit in one single label. And it led me to really wonder why we do have brands. I remember in fact, the last time I had the privilege of coming to the Library of Congress and was talking about the Woman who read too much. ^M00:20:03 I had a conversation with a wonderful friend, who is sitting here today and we were talking about political identity and identity politics. And how strongly it is influencing our modern society. And I found myself wondering why is it so influential in everything we do. And I concluded that it has something to do with the way in which tribalism has sort of married with marketing. And I first came across this phenomenon when my own daughter was going through the passage of adolescence, like so many adolescents wanting to wear black at all times. And I found that there were shops providing for. It had been industrialized, the gothic period of puberty had been seized upon by marketing forces and exploited to sell to young vulnerable people an identity that sort of imposed itself on their individuality. And I thought that this is happening everywhere. This is happening on all levels of our society where you're using these branding labels to tell us who we are, perhaps because of an anxiety about who we are, perhaps because we fear a kind of erosion of who we are. But it is extremely, it is making a commodity of us I decided. It is truly turning us into a sales object. I wanted to read to you if I may, the beginning of a chapter in America where the character Goli finds herself undergoing a lot of stress. I have to find the chapter, excuse me. and she goes in order to relax and have a bit of calm time. She goes to a pedicure clinic as it were. This is Los Angeles, this is bimbo blonde Persians worrying about their appearance with nose jobs and so forth. "Goli was upset and her feet knew it. They were in desperate need, that's how the brochure put it. Are your feet in desperate need, and they were. There was a solution of course as there was for everything in America. Step inside pedicure perfect and we'll change all that said the brochure. So, Goli stepped inside, sat herself down on one of the slippery pink chairs of pedicure perfect and took a deep breath. The girl who was going to change all that was called Simberline. The tag on her left breast said so. Americans had this habit of printing or repeating their name everywhere, and expected you to do the same. Goli looked at the spelling for a long time, not sure of the word. She'd heard of American and even Persian girls called Kim, but this sounded like the name of a logging company in Canada or something, or a product to keep household germs at bay as they said, or a multi-national that made sanitary pads. She hoped the girl didn't think she was staring at her breasts, she was only trying not to cry". I want to compare that if you don't mind, with another little passage which comes from the experience of the old lady coming to France. And in this chapter BiBi John finds herself alone in Paris, her daughter LiLi has gone off to be an artiste. LiLi is a photographer and takes pictures of nude ladies, which is something her mother seriously does not understand. So BiBi John is left alone and in order to have a little bit of company she leaves the apartment, which I have to tell you is an extremely strange place in her mind because it's up a serious of very narrow stairwell going round and round. And she gets to this tiny little apartment on the top floor, in the marray with low ceilings and the smell of drains and everything that a Persian lady would not like to have. So, here she is and she decides to go to the hairdresser and then sit in the park. And she's going to the Plaste Voge which is of course, one of the most exquisite places in Paris 17th century, you know Louis, the glorious kind of architecture all the way around, which is something she does not see at all. "Dimly through her thick lenses Bibi saw that one of the benches was partially free, with only a single occupant. She approached it hopefully, but as she drew near the elderly French woman sitting in the middle threw such an indignant glance at her that BiBi hesitated. She was only going to sit on the corner, but the woman seemed to think she was intended upon a takeover and making a bid for independence. She was only wearing scarf, duty free as a protection against frizzy hair. But this apparently made a French colony of her. She pushed the scarf back carefully and tried to smile. But the French woman looked pointedly away. She had blue tinted hair that obviously did not frizz although she may have used the same hairdresser as BiBi. She gave off the air of stale cologne and disapproval as BiBi John sat gingerly down, half-way -- sat gingerly down beside her feeling foreign and resigned. There was nowhere else to sit anyway given the pile of pigeon droppings at the other end of the bench, so much for her hope of meeting people. Bon jour she nodded timidly at her neighbor. It sound like "Bon Jour". She couldn't even get a handle on the accent. The French woman turned slightly away ignoring her. In fact, she looked rather nervous as well as disapproving and who could blame her trapped in the middle of a seesaw of a bench with an elderly lady and her headscarf sitting at one end and a pile of pigeon droppings at the other. She sighs because she's thinking about her daughters and the fact that she's a burden on them, and she sighs again. Her French neighbor with tinted hair flinched at the sigh. It was clearly intolerable to hear a foreigner sigh, not only once but twice. And she must have interpreted it as a criticism towards the Republic, for she rose abruptly at that moment and moved away. BiBi was flustered but she wanted to apologize, but didn't have the words. It was useless anyway because of her accent and the lack of vocabulary. "Oh ravah" she called out faintly as the French woman turned on her heel and ground across the gravel. But it was clear from the woman's enraged back as she stopped on towards the gate that the effort towards reconciliation and politess had not been enough". You realize in the course of the story that it is not only the foreigners, however that treat the Iranians as other, as them. It is the Iranians themselves that treat each other as them. And many times it's the Iranians who treat the foreigners as them. We have circles and circles of us and them in the Iranian community and I thought it might make you laugh just a change of voice to hear the wee voice interrupting the story of BiBi John. And telling you from the point of view of a mother in law what she thinks of her daughters in law. "We have both kinds in our family. The Eastern ones and the Westerners. And we can promise you the first lot caused all the problems. Getting into moods at every moment, taking offense at the drop of a hate. Forever overreacting to inferences, inventing reasons to be hurt or assuming that we are. So sensitive you can't say a thing to them without risking insult. Communicating with the [Inaudible] girls, that is the foreigners. It's frankly much easier with them at least you know where you are, in spite of the language barrier. It's straightforward, it's blunt. They say exactly what they mean, everything is cut and dried with them, but with our Persian daughters in law, God help us. We have to walk on eggs the whole time and imagine all the things they aren't saying. In some ways it's a blessing of course, it's an advantage that the harangues don't always understand what we're saying. You know what we mean, at least there's no harangues with them, no endless compliments, no twisting into insistent knots to say what you don't actually believe. There's none of that with the foreigners. But in other ways it's hurtful too. You know they can be quite tactless at times and take candor to such an extreme that you wonder whether they lack imagination or are simply stupid. No courtesies, no compliments, everything at face value. A no is a no and a yes means they should fix it. Fixing things is what harangues are good at. But that's where it ends. There you are half blind, feeling for your cane and they ask "Do you need anything"? And of course you say, "No". And it doesn't go one inch further. ^M00:30:04 Of course they bend and pick the cane up for you when it clatters to the floor, that's not the point. But then they go off with a peck on the cheek and a cheerful good bye dumping you for the rest of the afternoon as if the cane was really all that you're not asking for". Well how can I tell you a little bit more about this story? It could be that you may have looked on the blog site for Stanford University Press and you may find there are several of the chapters that I've already read on that, and that could be intersting. But there is one that I didn't read and I might just quickly give you a taste of that. And that's in the -- towards the end of the book again, when we have a section on marriages or weddings, excuse me. I should have put my little stick it things on this, but I didn't. Oh maybe even this would be better. This is a little bit about a reflection on why I've used this structure in fact and it's a small chapter called "Losing the Plot". And it's about the way in which Iranians write stories. You know we've got great tradition of poetry in Iran. We've also got a most fascinating tradition in passion plays but we don't' necessarily have the same tradition in novel writing. We don't' have that wonderful western psychological realism tradition which we have learned because we're good at imitating. There's a chapter in this book called "Imitation" about the way we know how to imitate. But we have borrowed the psychological realism structure of the novel. It doesn't come natural to the person psyche and in this chapter called "Losing the plot" I explore that idea. "The old film ended as such films do with a drum roll of a sunset, or was it a sun rise? Which faded into the chant of an opening rose. It was a splendid climax. We liked the grand finale of a sunset or a sunrise. We love a film resolving in a rose, all our fears melt with that lovely image. All our hopes blossom with that stirring sound. There is something characteristically Persian, classically Iranian about those symbols. You really can't go wrong with them as far as we're concerned. Of course there is the reed too, the other metaphor of ours, yes we can't do without the reed. More anguished than the rose. More visceral than the sunset, expressive of suffering of martyrdom, of existential pain in the old poems, rude hangs grasped me, slashed me to the core, brute fingers plucked me from the soft river floor. Such images are appropriate to our heritage, our religion our history. They recall the anguish and ardor of the nightingale that ultimate icon of our culture and our art. They remind us that the golden lion on who's back the son of the old regime rose and set bore a loft of curved and cruel symatog. We're referring to the older regime naturally, the regime of the 19th century. The one before the one most people now call old, or rather what we used to call old before we became it ourselves. Persians think, people think that Persians are good at plots. They think we are masters of storytelling, the then and the and then of charizod. But it's not metaphorical logic we prefer. Metaphors are our forte, we love the way metaphors and similes shift and change, ignoring consequence reversing temporal direction. Conspiracy theories we have no trouble with, but we are not so hot on plot, at least in the narrative sense. What we look for in the film are the roses and the sunsets, and the reed. My skin they fluid until I was raw. My lips they split, my throat they cruelly tore". I won't go on because that's just a taste of this book and it's also an apologies for why I haven't fitted the brand of a normal novel telling you the psychological realistic story of one individual all the way through to the end. This is a story about a family and a fractured family. It's a story about a whole culture that has been scattered and fractured across the planet. And I do hope that in reading it you might find something in it that you also associate with. I came across a marvelous statement by Mossan Hamid, the writer of the reluctant fundamentalist who has also come out with a fascinating book called Exit West, on migrants which maybe you have on your library shelves. He said, "even people who stay in the same place undergo a kind of migration through time, everyone is a migrant". And I do hope that this book really does appeal to many other kinds of groups. Aminatta Forna, the marvelous Siera Leonian Scotts writer I mentioned says something about branding, which I thought would be useful to remember. Sometimes she says, we need labels just to be able to describe the thing we're talking about, but labels confirm the limitations of language and when they are overused they become limiting. And perhaps the last quote I could use for today is one from marvels Marilyn Robinson who I greatly revere. "When people draw a bright line between us and then", she writes, "Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing. And are in fact regarded as a huge problem to the us who presume to judge them. When this assumption takes hold, the definition of community hardens and becomes violently exclusive and defensive. Definitions of us and them begin to contract and as they shrink and narrow becoming increasingly inflamed or dangerous and inhumane, this tedious pattern has repeated itself endlessly through human history. And it is the end of community and the beginning of tribalism".
I think we're all quite aware of the fact that we're living at a time when those definitions have contracted, have hardened, are producing notions of narrowness that divide us from one another. And this has happened before and we've known it in history and we have noticed that when there is that recoil that retraction, that reaction against being open it is inevitably followed by a kind of turning of the tide and the wave comes rolling back again and we find ourselves being far more inclusive, it was a recoil in the 30's. It was an expansion again after the second World War. I hope we don't have to have another war but the recoil is certainly building up to a Tsunami type proportion now. I can only hope that we will reach out to each other even more as a result. Certainly the recoil has been repeated but so has the positive reaction to it, the desire to be inclusive. If my book can promote that movement even slightly, I will be grateful. And very grateful indeed to have this opportunity to talk to you. Thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Hirad Dinavari: Thank you very much Dr. Nakhjavani. We have some opportunity for questions. Mary-Jane has a question for you, go ahead.
>> I want to thank you so much, it was a very, very -- it was a fascinating book presentation. I am wondering, I wonder what you think about another way of looking at labeling. Is it a way also, in addition to explaining that which is not easily understood? Because if you have a label you can add all kind of attitudes and all kinds of values [Inaudible]. Just explain the other who is not, who doesn't fit into one of the categories that us or the other.
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Yes.
>> So can it be also a lazy way of saying "Why do I have to understand that person"? I can just [Inaudible] and then I don't need to understand. 
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: I think you're absolutely right. It's an easy shorthand. It's a form of shorthand. It doesn't have to be nefarious. It's got a kind of innocence to it. A substitute for explaining. but I think that it's been exploited and it's been used to divide. And I think that's also been in some ways the act of separation and distinctiveness of our identities in terms of culture; in terms of gender have been a necessary process for our society. We've been thrown in into each other's laps in a way that never happened before. We were always in our little bubbles until war and colonialism and expansion of empire and exploitation of differences have forced us to confront each other. And with the 20th century I think we find ourselves jostling in these conditions trying to figure out where do I belong? So it's been a -- I've always thought of it as a process of adolescence that we're having to go through. As adolescents we need to define ourselves from our families, from our siblings to distinguish ourselves as individuals. It's very healthy to do so and I think we have, and are in the process of doing that. But I think you can see the beginning signs of where it becomes what Marilyn Robinson is describing and then the laziness becomes dangerous and then we begin to need to question how far we can push that, how far we can let it just go because we need to have more of the unites while keeping our distinction than more that differentiates, yes. Yes please.
>> I just finished an article [Inaudible] it's one of the things as you were just speaking that I wondered about. There's the question of who is defining universal, right? It's the branding, if there is this universal is it an expansive universal? Or is it universal that is like the colonial powers of understanding the universal and then how do people react to that? And one of the ideas that I was reading about that as I was working on this encyclopedia article, I'm curious whether this rings true in some way, not as a good thing but like accurate description is that part of what you're struggling with his how to retain a sense of a cultural identify from whatever piece of the bubble mattered. In this new place consumption, and therefore marketing, is it really easy quantifiable way to do it? I can -- I don't know I am the daughter of the [Inaudible] daughter in law, right? And so I can be here in my mother's culture except when I want to put on a [Inaudible] or something like that, and a piece of my father's culture and wear it. Until I want to take it off again, right? So that I can go back to being and that would be true too if I weren't the daughter of a [Inaudible] daughter in law. If I were one of my cousins, two immigrants. It's this way and it doesn't really work because it's not necessarily -- but I'm wondering if that makes sense, push and pull?
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Yes, well I think what you're describing is something all immigrants have done putting the hat on, taking it off, wearing this costume when we're in this group, taking it off when we're in another. But I do believe wholeheartedly in the organic process of civilization. I think the human species has extraordinary capacities to absorb and to maybe it's because I look at what the English language has done. It is an absorbing process that happens in language. And that is an extension of the human mind. It's what's going up on here in the neurons, the new patterns and pathways that we're creating. The English language has this way of sucking in all the differences. There is no universal culture that is imposing itself on the new word. It is that word that is influencing the use of language as a whole. And so I don't think it's either you get imposed upon or you impose. I think there is an organic process going on here, and I think the artificial divisions of colonialism and even industrialization and commodify -- these are artificial processes to buy and sell. There is a buyer and a seller, so as long as we can shift the focus so that everybody is selling and everybody is buying, you know if we're going to use that metaphor, it has to be more organic. It has to flow across the boundaries. I wrote a chapter in here about assimilation, it's called "Assimilation" and it starts off with a new comer from Iran, confronting Iranians who have been out of the country for a long time. And when she first comes she's very anxious to be accepted by the old comers. So she's trying very hard to be terribly modern and secular and disregarding what is in Iran and identifying herself as totally atheist and non-connected with Islam as it were. And as the story progresses, I don't want to give the game away completely. But we see the shift in her assimilation and we see her assimilation affecting the fact that she's out of the country, is affecting her. It's affecting her interlocutors as well. Their position is being affected by her reactions to begin abroad. And so it's that osmosis which I think is interesting and the constant reminder that we are not mechanical creatures, we are not parts of some artificial organism. We are an organism, we're not man made. We have the capacity to change extraordinarily and to affect change. So I don't know who the universal us is going to be. I don't know what the universal language is going to be. I hope it's a little bit more interesting than Globish is at the moment, you know what I mean? I have hope that we can perhaps enrich rather than impoverish who we are.
>> Quick comments and then a question. 
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[ Inaudible ]
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>> The second thing I was going to say in many ways what you were describing is a universal feeling not just particularly in the acceptance of people in France. Everybody who has gone to France has undergone that.
>> Absolutely.
>> I know they pretend like they don't understand what I'm saying and look at me quizzically. But I have a question that I've always wondered. I have a lot of Iranian friends who only associate themselves with begin Persian but not being Iranian, what is that phenomenon where they're not associating with the country but with a culture?
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Well somebody asked me that same question when I was in San Francisco and it really is interesting that we've subdivided Iran and Persia. But bear in mind that Persia was also the name of the country before it -- there have been fluctuations in the historical naming of this land. I don't know, I think the people who prefer to call themselves Persian are making a branding statement about their non-identification with the present regime. I mean people have all kinds of reasons for why they put symboline on their left breast. I went through a period where I liked being called Persian. Because I liked the sound and I remember the little pink country on the map when I was growing up and it was called Persia, but it wasn't necessarily for political reasons. But I think you're right we associate the word Persia with nightingales, roses, music, literature and we imagine that Iran does not mean that. But that similarly come across young Iranians and very often they're young, not necessarily only young but who are very very patriotic about the word Iran and the greatness of Iran and the glory of the past civilization so Iran. So they were also being proudly Iranian and it had nothing to do with the present regime. So I think it really depends on the temperament, the personality whoever it happens to be. We're always looking for identity and this is the whole issue. Is our identity actually helping others also be included or are we making a statement that excludes or is this just a phase or you know it's all good, it's all good so long as it doesn't make us feel nervous about anybody. 
^M00:49:24
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^M00:49:43
>> People kind of label to what they [Inaudible] Now if you actually look on those books, there are minute shades of differences across the meaning of those books on the shelf. And this would be true of yours, it covers a unique slice. this is what I think is interesting about this whole process. ^M00:50:05 Is that I'm kind of a [Inaudible] Iranians like yours, you're Iranian you must like mirrors. Wrong?
>> Wrong.
>> But you get into these problems and that's where I think there's some kind of conflict and I don't' know how you see this with the, I think you address it well in the beauty parlor or this person perceives some kind of other and does' like it because of the labeling.
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Well I think the labeling; I myself have been constantly shifting around not knowing how to be branded. I mean I get branded by the publisher, you know they want to fix the label on you. The women who read too much suddenly became a feminist novel. Or I become an Iranian writer because I happen to be speaking about Iran. And I think the genre of categories in book shops force you into these little pockets and this is something, this is a new phenomena. This is about trying desperately to sell books. 150 years ago we never had these categorizations. We were just trying to write, and writing about what we knew. Can you imagine Jane Austin being labeled? First of all she would have cringed at the thought of being identified on a market shelf, but I think this is something that we have to question because it goes very deep into our politics how money is influencing our choices of who we are, who we elect, what kind of country we want to have. It's so profoundly deep in our society, everywhere including France. So yeah.
^M00:52:00
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^M00:53:33
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: I'm so glad you said that because economics is fundamental to this story and you see people who have had a great deal, who lose everything. And people how have a great deal but don't feel connected to those that don't have in this community. And I particularly wanted to look at the way in which people how have had a lot and lose everything, react to that. Some who spend the rest of their lives in mourning and in lamentation for what could have been and what was. And others who pull themselves up by their socks and become something new and create a  new creation out of themselves as a result of this deprivation and this loss and shaping up and separation from all that is familiar. and in particular I've been fascinated by how that affects the women here. I hope that doesn't make me a feminist, but I really have been interested because in traditional Iranian society women especially in the wealthy sector were ornaments and were there to grace the lapel of the family. But when they find themselves deprived of everything and end up working in a supermarket and through toil and hard work getting their kids raised, that's strength of character and that's reality in who they are. It's not their brand, it's their strength and side. And I was hoping to break through the us and them in order to show that inner strength. This is a book called us and them with the connected in the middle of us and them. It's not us vs. them, it's not us or them. It's not even us, gap, and gap them. It's us and them. So I hope that that new word that combines the two illustrates the sort of strength that we need to rise above these and to bring together the extremes that are pulling societies apart. Yeah.
^M00:56:02
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^M00:56:42
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Exactly and that's the beautiful irony you know? You find that the deprivation is actually the opportunity for growth sometimes.
^M00:56:55
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^M00:59:14
>> Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: That's so interesting. First of all I must say that universal element, that rootedness in our identity. I played with that through the metaphor of smells in this book. So all the way through you've got a thread of feno Greek and wherever you happen to go there is Persian [Inaudible] and it does not change no matter which country you're in or anything else. The symbol of that thing which keeps us always Persian or Iranian but what you said about Iranian film I think is so important and so interesting. In that chapter that I read a little bit of called losing the plot, at the end of that chapter because it starts if you recall about a film. It says the old film ended as most of these old films do with a sunset and a rose and it ends up talking about modern film, modern Iranian film and you realize that the voice of the we here as clearly distinguished in the beginning that we are old. The old we has great difficulty with modern Iranian film, and the reason for it is maybe I could just read one little tiny paragraph to clarify what I mean, or is there no time. No time, you have to read the book.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
^E01:00:43