Substance is King. Style is Queen. When their rule is shared equally, tranquility reigns. When one is privileged over the other, balance is thrown off and discord arises. A deception takes place. So, as I reflect on Roya Hakakian’s “Journey from the Land of No”, I would do well to remember that it is both Art and Journalism - manifestations of style and substance. In terms of it’s content “Journey from the Land of No” presents a picture of the Iranian revolution of 1979, its antecedents, and subsequent outcomes, consistent with similar texts on the subject such as “Persepolis”, “Funny in Farsi”, and “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. This is all the more amazing because all of these books are so divergent in style.
“Journey from the Land of No” is a stylized presentation of reality. Roya Hakakian filters her story through a romantic lens, presenting us with a perfect family residing in a perfect community, nestled in a perfect country. Then, chapter-by-chapter the perfection slowly erodes, the surface beauty is peeled away until we suddenly find ourselves in the least wonderful place on earth. We begin in a child's utopia and end in an unspecified circle of Dante’s Inferno. Throughout the tour Roya never removes the romantic filter through which she views and conveys her experience. What she chooses to omit is as important as what she choose to highlight. Style is shaped through a careful sculpting of substance, and we are left with a highly refined vision of life in pre/post revolutionary Iran. Like an adult re-living her past through the eyes of her childhood, quotidian and mundane encounters are re-presented as sublime and fantastic, resulting in a distortion of the Iranian experience such that the reader is forced (or fooled) into interpreting the life of all Iranians as idyllic romance or perilous adventure. Hakakian gives us melodrama, which makes for great story telling but leaves the true nature of Iranian life to be told by fiction writers.
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Nice analysis of Hakakian's rose colored view of Iran. My son's view of Iran is much the same despite the fact that he grew up in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. He was largely unaware of the war or its affect on the country or his immediate community and had a great time with friends and family living in a small protected suburb of Tehran. He still remembers Iran as paradise and never had to deal with the difficulties Iranian adults faced there at that time.
Many young people who have fairly average family environments, free of any major abuse will grow up with an idyllic view of their lives. They are often largely unaware of the economic or social issues adults are confronting.
Frankly there are some problems I have had to deal with here in the U.S. that have been harder than anything I have had to face in Iran. Despite the war, and all the negative things happening in Iran while I was there, overall I had a very good life in Iran. That was not everyone's experience by any means.
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