A Man With a Country

Currently I am the process of rereading Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" with an eye toward writing a short blog review of it, but today my attention was directed toward an interview conducted by the online magazine Guernica (http://www.guernicamag.com), of Iranian professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi head of the North American Studies graduate program at the University of Tehran. In this interview Marandi is particularly critical of both Nafisi and Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis", specifically accusing both of "gross distortions of Iran", and being "deeply flawed and contain[ing] dubious material". Pressed by the interviewer Marandi goes on to list a couple of the inaccuracies in these memoirs and asserts that no standard of verification seems to be required by the writers or editors.

There are many comments one might make in regard to Mr. Marandi's assertions, but what most intrigues me is how reality is woven and rewoven with words. Marandi's comments implicate not only the authors of these memoirs, (and like memoirs) of willful distortion, but explicates a collusion amongst American publishers to only represent Iran in a certain way, thus reinforcing the distorted view we have cultivated here in the west. But the tenor of his comments leads me to believe that he cultivates his own distorted view of America among his students in Iran, focusing on America as a simplistic political entity and not recognizing it's rich cultural variety, or the ability of it's citizens to hold complex and multiple ideological views of Iran. I don't know if this is a fact but it certainly is the impression his comments leave me with.

The point here is that all accounts of reality are edited to fit the intent of the author. Individual experiences are just that, individual, and will therefore always have a particular slant or bias. Mix in the selective nature of memory and we have a recipe for distortion. Editorial is inevitable and ALL history/story is a distortion. The best we can do in lieu of a personal experience is read broadly and across ideological spectrums, and try to ferret out the 'facts' and weave together the common themes. This is the closest we ever come to historical "truth".