¹ I leave out some names: Dumas's, Firoozeh Funny in Farsi (New York, 2003)Google Scholar and Latifi's, Afschineh Even after All this Time (New York, 2005)Google Scholar, for example. If we look further back than the last decade, we can include Sattareh Farmaian's, Farman Daughter of Persia (New York, 1992)Google Scholar, and if we include work by men, we might include Milani's, Abbas Tales of Two Cities (New York, 1997)Google Scholar. If we include those writing in Europe, we also have Guppy's, Shusha The Blindfold Horse (London, 1988)Google Scholar, published in England. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis books are important as well if we include graphic memoir originally published in French. I cannot cover all these texts, but almost all of them deal, at some point, with the question of language. Nafisi's, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran (New York, 2003)Google Scholar is important in terms of the politics of Western literacy, but a consideration of her work would take the current discussion too far astray of its focus on Persia and identity in memoirs of migration.

² Karim, Persis and Khorrami, Mohammad Mehdi, eds., A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian Americans (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

³ Joshua Fishman, “Ethnicity as Being, Doing, and Knowing,” in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford, 1996), 64.

⁴ Fishman, “Ethnicity,” 66.

⁵ Fishman, Joshua, In Praise of the Beloved Language: A Comparative View of Positive Ethnolinguistic Consciousness (Berlin, 1996), 45Google Scholar.

⁶ Fishman, In Praise, 34.

⁷ I exclude Latina/os in America because of the widespread use of Spanish in American culture more generally. One might also include Yiddish and Jewish American culture here. There are ways in which words like nada or kvetch enter into American speech that Persian words never may.

⁸ Modarressi, Taghi, “Writing with an Accent,” Chanteh Volume i (1992): 7–9Google Scholar.

⁹ Modarressi, “Accent,” 9.

¹⁰ See Rahimieh, Nasrin, Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History (Syracuse, 2001), 7–8Google Scholar, and Naficy, Hamid, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, 2001), 23–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Rahimieh, Missing Persians, 8.

¹² Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis, 1986), 16–19Google Scholar.

¹³ Naficy, Accented Cinema, 24.

¹⁴ Rahimieh, Missing Persians, 9.

¹⁵ Rahimieh, Missing Persians, 6.

¹⁶ Rahimieh, Missing Persians, 166.

¹⁷ Rahimieh, Missing Persians, 164.

¹⁸ Rahimieh, Missing Persians, 7.

¹⁹ Rahimieh, Nasrin, “Pregnant with Sorrow,” in A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian Americans, ed. Karim, Persis and Khorrami, Mohammad Mehri (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

²⁰ The word's relation to eating is profound. Ghosseh translates as “that which gets stuck in the throat,” and the onomatopoeia of the initial glottal g underscores the feeling of sorrow or grief—the pain in the throat with which we are all familiar. Mohammad Ma'een, Farhang-e Farsi (The Culture of Farsi) (Tehran, 2003/1381), 782.

²¹ Rahimieh, “Pregnant,” 236.

²² Asayesh, Gelareh, Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America (Boston, 1999), 3Google Scholar.

²³ Asayesh, Saffron Sky, 213.

²⁴ For example, Asayesh makes distinctions between America's “lofty intellectualism” and Iran's “simple faith” (31). Given the prominence of religious faith in American politics and society, and given the long, complex, and “lofty” tradition of Iranian intellectuals—indeed, some of them quite religious—this distinction seems reductive at best.

²⁵ Asayesh, Saffron, 213.

²⁶ Bahrampour, Tara, To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America (New York, 1999), 31Google Scholar.

²⁷ Bahrampour, To See and See Again, 50.

²⁸ Bahrampour, To See and See Again, 50.

²⁹ Bahrampour, To See and See Again, 50, 57.

³⁰ Modarressi, “Writing,” 8.

³¹ Hoffman's, Eva Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York: 1990), 106Google Scholar. Also, see Sarup's, Madan discussion of Hoffman's autobiography, including her conception of language and identity, in Sarup's Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World (Edinburgh, 1996), 5Google Scholar.

³² Moaveni, Azadeh, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (New York, 2005), 70Google Scholar.

³³ Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad, 89.

³⁴ Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad, 89.

³⁵ Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad, 78.

³⁶ Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad, 79.

³⁷ Milani, Abbas, Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (New York, 1997), 258–9Google Scholar.

³⁸ Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad, 68.

³⁹ Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad, 68.

⁴⁰ “Despite their myriad differences, of place, time, histories, economies, cultural identifications, all ‘I's are rational, agentive, unitary. Thus the ‘I’ becomes ‘Man,’ putatively a marker of the universal human subject whose essence remains outside the vagaries of history …” See Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, Introduction. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis, 1992), xvii.

⁴¹ Hakakian, Roya, Journey to the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (New York, 2004), 15Google Scholar, emphasis added.

⁴² Hakakian, Journey, 50.

⁴³ Hakakian, Journey, 72.

⁴⁴ Hakakian, Journey, 95.

⁴⁵ According to Michel Foucault, the post-enlightenment nation state borrowed a pastoral form of power from earlier Christian formations of identity in community, thereby mediating the individual subject's relationship to God and salvation through the intercession of a self-less guide. The aim of pastoral power, as Foucault defines it in “The Subject and Power,” is to assure individual salvation. It is not merely a form of power that commands; it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock. Therefore, it is different from royal power, which demands a sacrifice from its subjects. Rather than coercing the subject of power into compliance, pastoral power places the individual at the center of power relations. Most importantly, pastoral power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people's minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their inner-most secrets. Thus, in modern forms of power, institutions such as psychiatric hospitals and literary forms such as autobiography and memoir become important technologies of power. See “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982). For a critique of Foucault's notion of pastoral power and confession as a form of control see, also Afary, Janet and Anderson, Kevin, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago, 2005), 30–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Sullivan, Zohreh, “Introduction: Fabricating Identities,” Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora (Philadelphia, 2001), 1–20Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Zohreh Sullivan, “Introduction,” 24.

⁴⁸ Alvarez, Julia, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (New York, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Sullivan, Exiled Memories, 201.