Another Sea, Another Shore

Abstract

Most critics of modern Persian literature would agree that the emergent Iranian diaspora literature is both rearticulating and challenging traditional Persian narratives of identity, nationality, nation-state, and homeland. Another Sea, Another Shore is an admirable attempt to bring together in a single volume representative samples of this diaspora literature, rooted in at least 25 years of exilic experiences. The editors, Shouleh Vatanabadi and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, have done a superb job in selecting the stories as well as in translating them in a fluid, straightforward language. The book contains 21 stories grouped under three headings that roughly divide narratives into initial experiences of migrating/travelling, exilic experience, and more settled diasporic articulations. Represented in the volume are narratives of such well-established writers as Reza Baraheni, Hushang Golshiri, Nasim Khaksar, and Dariush Kargar, as well as those of such new writers as Kader Abdolah, Tahereh Alavi, and Marjan Riahi, among others. The constant themes of shattered dreams, unfulfilled hopes, disconnected borders, ruptured identities, unfamiliar and defamiliarized spaces running through each story testify to the fact that this migration of a generation of exiled Iranians was no ordinary migration. It was not just about leaving one’s home behind; it was, more importantly, about not being able to return. And this inability was powerful enough to drive some exiles and their loved ones back home to the shores of insanity – and even death. In “Anxieties from Across the Water,” Pari Mansouri masterfully depicts this painful saga when a mother concludes that “the pain of separation will kill me in the end” (p. 7). And it does. Among the collected stories, Mehri Yalfani’s “Without Roots” perhaps best captures the essence of what one may call an Iranian diasporic experience. In this powerful piece, Yalfani demonstrates a complex web of relationships, conflicts, and interactions that migration creates, such as the ones between home and host cultures, old and young generations, males and females, as well as those emerging from class issues, racism, and processes of resocialization and identity formation. The old generation of Iranian ...