The Novel "Children of the Jacaranda Tree" from Sahar Delijani. Effects of diasporic, postmodern and gender based Narration

Globalized Gendered Based Diaspora of Postmodern Iranian Novels: Case Study of Sahar Delijani’s Children of the Jacaranda Tree

Kian Pishkar, Islamic Azad University Jieroft Branch, Islamic Republic of Iran

Dr. Shamenaz Bano, Assistant Professor, Department of English, RTMM, Allahabad, India

Iranians love poetry and it is said that all Iranians try their hand at writing poetry at least once in their lives. In Iran, it is not unusual to hear verses from poets living 600 to 900 years ago. They pop up in daily interactions, on TV and radio, and even during political speeches. Unfortunately, this widespread enthusiasm for poetry doesn't result in a strong reading culture. The public's reception of modern works of literature depends on different political, social, and economic factors, with numerous ups and downs in recent history.

In spite of a rich trove of classical works (mainly poems), modern Iranian literature is less than a hundred years old. If we consider the works of Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951) in fiction and Nima Yushij (1895-1960) in poetry as the beginning of Iran's modern literature, then we can discern two influential factors in its development. First, there is a certain level of familiarity and interaction with the latest intellectual trends and literary achievements of the West. Second, a political openness at home, which brings about a suitable atmosphere for exchange of ideas and publication of new voices.

Sahar Delijani (born,1983) an Iranian author whose debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree, is a novel which reflects a female writer’s voice out of her country which symbolically presents a diasporic, gender based voice that has been raised out of her homeland(abroad, in USA and Italy) and tries to reflect her voice in her second language with a globalized view based on her natural feminist and cultural background. Her novel is a political protest but here we just want to analyze the effect of its diasporic, postmodern and gender based narration of globalized world of literature. The novel is divided to 13chapters, which two chapters are in Turin, Italy (which novel ends in Turin to prove its diasporic nature) and others in Tehran without seriously considering chronological order of narration which can be considered a kind of semi-stream of consciousness with about 122 pages with an Iranian setting which events happens after Islamic revolution in Tehran (capital of I.R. Iran) and in 1979. The narrator and characters are mostly ladies with their own problem but all of them indicate to the same situation which was dominant during the imposed War of Iraq with I.R. Iran (in Iran it has been called the Eight years Holy Defense, and in the West they call it the First Persian Gulf War). The nostalgic atmosphere of the novel and the memories which have been re-narrated by the author shows the author’s a delicate feelings about her lost motherland and hometown and as a wanderer in the world as cursed one with a diasporic life that has been accepted in the postmodern world by all.

The author plays with symbols in this novel from Iranian proper names which have been used according to the dominant culture (National and Religious) to special symbols like the title of the book Children of the Jacaranda Tree which children always are symbols of innocence and the title of the book, a name of tree which is symbol of hope and somehow utopia, and the name of characters (Omid= hope, Azar= fire, Reza= satisfied with God’s wishes, Neda =voice of hope and so on) which can be considered symbolically and analyzed according to diasporic and globalized features of literature that has been narrated through a delicate feminist view which has used so many other nostalgic elements in her story and novel as points that with them she will remember her own motherland and may be because of this elements some part of the novel needs to be explained by some footnotes.

The title of the novel refers to the children of the Islamic revolution. The jacaranda tree is as a symbolic utopian image of the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 against ex-king of Iran. The novel talks about three women: Azar, Parisa and Ferozeh and their children who are born during the conflict in Iran. The children of the title are their children – kids who were born in the post-revolutionary period and raised in a new Islamic situation.

The book is very much inspired by writer's own family’s story, especially the early chapters set in the 1980s in Tehran. Her parents, uncles and aunts were dedicated political activists before and during the Islamic revolution. Iranians abroad or Iranian diaspora are Iranian people living outside of Iran and their children were born abroad. According to various sources, in 2010, there were an estimated four to five million Iranians living abroad, mostly in the North America, Europe, and Australia. For the most part, they emigrated after the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the thoughts, desires and dreams of these people are reflected in their writing with a new frame which is a global one in literature. Iranian writers have longed for a larger, global audience beyond the limitations of the language, ever since Sadegh Hedayat wrote two of his short stories in French. The waves of migration out of Iran during the last fifty years, and closer contact with cultural circles abroad, have resulted in Iranian modern literature – and its translation into European languages – gaining more attention. We see a lot many examples of Iranian writers like Hamid Dabbashi, Azar Nafisi and Seher Delijani to name few.

The novel has diaspora or exile as also one of the prominent theme. Edward Said’s notion of exile is also in the vein of the Jewish catastrophic tradition, for he grounds it on the old practice of banishment. Although he points at some of the advantages of this condition such as the originality of vision, he dwells more on its negative aspects. For Said, exile is a state of ‘terminal loss’ and isolation, toned down in literary renderings: On the twentieth-century scale, exile is neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible: at most the literature about exile objectifies an anguish and a predicament most people rarely experience at first hand; but to think of the exile informing this literature as beneficially humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts upon those who suffer them ... Is it not true that the views of exile in literature ... obscure what is truly horrendous ... that it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography? (Said 1990: 357-8). In this passage, Said underlines the tragedy of uprootedness inherent in any situation of displacement, bypassing the possibility of an enriching community life beyond the confines of the homeland. ‘Exile’, he goes on to say, ‘is a solitude experienced outside the group: the deprivations felt at not being with others in the communal habitation’ (358). Said’s concept of exile does not only emphasize its most negative side, but is grounded on a notion of culture and community confined to the boundaries of the nation-state. More recent contributions to the theorization of diaspora stress the need to go beyond the catastrophic tradition. The literature produced in the 1990s on this subject celebrates displacements as sites of creation, transcending negative notions of displacement as exile, although George Lamming’s 1960 work The Pleasures of Exile pioneers this line of thought with statements like ‘to be an exile is to be alive’ (24). The author of After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora, for instance, explains that ‘there is another way of living after exile, in the choice to remain in the diaspora’ (Kaminsky 1999: 16). Recent discourses on displacement, then, highlight this shift from the notion of exile to that of diaspora. Robin Cohen criticizes Saffran’s model for being too Jewish-oriented and thus exclusive. In turn, he calls for a model that makes room for ‘more ambiguous’ cases of diaspora, such as the case of the Caribbean peoples (Cohen 1997: 22). However, he does not turn down Saffran’s diaspora features, but introduces some interesting amendments. Distancing himself from the catastrophic or victim tradition, he introduces a voluntaristic element in the dispersal from the homeland that may also happen ‘in search of work, in pursuit of trade, or to further colonial ambitions’. Therefore, he establishes a typology of diasporas, encompassing ‘victim diasporas’ -the Jewish and African-‘imperial diasporas’ -the Ancient Greek or the British-, or ‘labor diasporas’ -the Indian-, among others, acknowledging possible overlapping so that one diaspora can be victim and labor at the same time. Paul Gilroy’s work is another landmark in the process of codification of the diaspora concept. Unlike the above mentioned diaspora critics, who elaborate on a number of diasporic configurations -Jewish, Armenian, Turkish, Chinese, and so on- , Gilroy exclusively links diaspora to the dispersal of African peoples in the New World due to the slave trade, what he has labeled the Black Atlantic. His treatment of the term is closer to Saffran’s than to Tololyan’s or Cohen’s, in that he stresses the parallels between the Jewish and the African experience of exile, thus attaching himself to classical definitions of diaspora.

Clifford adds that “diasporic cultures work to maintain community, selectively preserving and recovering traditions, ‘customizing’ and ‘versioning’ them in novel, hybrid, and often antagonistic situations.”41 He further qualifies his thinking by arguing that “Diaspora cultures are, to varying degrees, produced by regimes of political domination and economic inequality. But these violent processes of displacement do not strip people of their ability to sustain distinctive political communities and cultures of resistance.”

Diasporic communities, generally speaking, possess a number of characteristics. Regardless of their location, members of a diaspora share an emotional attachment to their ancestral land, are cognizant of their dispersal and, if conditions warrant, of their oppression and alienation in the countries in which they reside. Members of diasporic communities also tend to possess a sense of “racial,” ethnic, or religious identity that transcends geographic boundaries, to share broad cultural similarities, and sometimes to articulate a desire to return to their original homeland. No diasporic community manifests all of these characteristics or shares with the same intensity an identity with its scattered ancestral kin. In many respects, Diasporas are not actual but imaginary and symbolic communities and political constructs; it is we who often call them into being.

In most cases, the classical Diaspora theoretical framework focuses on ethnic representations, the reasons and conditions of dispersal, traumatic pasts and connections with the homeland. It also concentrates on integration issues in host societies, but not on where and how these people lived before actual migration to their current place of residence and, most importantly, what cultural baggage (symbolic or otherwise) they continue to bring with them from their countries of (re-) migration to a concrete local community.

The classical debate of the Diaspora group revolves around the concept of ethnicity as the unifying category, as the proof of origin, which reasserts the group solidarity and commonality Floya Anthias claims that applying ethnicity as the main analytical category in Diaspora studies makes it difficult to examine trans-ethnic commonalities and relations. One of the first scholars to establish the main criteria of the classical theory is William Safran, who in his short article “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return “describes a number of groups and classifies them according to the following points:

- Dispersal from a center to two or more peripheral or foreign regions;
- Retention of collective memory, vision or myth;
- The belief that full acceptance by the host country is not possible, resulting in alienation and insult;
- regard for the ancestral homeland as the true or ideal home and place of final return;
- Commitment to the maintenance or restoration of safety and prosperity in the homeland;
- And personal or vicarious relations to the homeland in an ethno-communal consciousness.

In its literal sense, Globalization can be viewed as the process of metamorphosis of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It is an ongoing process for the integrity of regional economies, societies and cultures through worldwide networks of exchange. Globalization is often used to refer to economic globalization, that is, “integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, foreign direct investment (by corporations and multinationals), short-term capital flows, and international flows of workers and humanity generally, and flows of technology.” Or as in a broad overview definition, “globalization is the worldwide process of homogenizing prices, products, wages, rates of interest and profits.” Accordingly globalization has been established as a key idea in the economics and just as a buzzword of academic milieu since 1990s, the term has become one of the most hotly debated issues of the previous and present centuries in other areas of human knowledge such as social, political, cultural and literary studies, as economics couldn’t be dealt with separately.

[...]