It's prime time for Persians
`I haven't felt so oppressed since the ayatollah blew up my beach house," jokes Nasim, the handyman on the NBC series Whoopi. Played by stand-up comic Omid Djalili, Nasim is the quintessential sitcom sidekick: round, lovable, full of contagious energy. Only Nasim's not so quintessential. He's Iranian, and he's not afraid to admit it. "How did you come to the States?" a character asks in the pilot, airing this week. "I ran," Nasim snorts.
Twenty years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a benevolent Iranian character on network TV. In 1979, when a group of revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 American hostages, Iran became a national bad guy. Americans bought "Iranians: Go Home" bumper stickers; President Carter ordered the deportation of illegal Iranian students.
"Americans did not distinguish between Iranians here and the government in Iran," says Hamid Naficy, a professor at Rice University who studies the portrayal of Iranians in the media. "Because of shame and guilt, Iranians didn't really announce themselves. People dyed their hair blond and pretended to be Greek or Mexican or Italian. It was easier that way."
Fast forward a couple of decades--and into the present anti-Iraq era. First-generation Iranian-Americans, having grown up without accents or other cultural barriers, are assimilating into American society, and they are not trying to hide their identity by calling themselves Persian, as their parents might have. "Within 10 years," predicts Firoozeh Dumas, author of Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America, "Iranians are going to be so well integrated . . . people will forget that it wasn't always this way." Her take on life in America as a child immigrant joins two influential memoirs by Iranian women published this year. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi recounts her attempts to teach books banned by the government in Iran. And Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood uses the graphic novel form to show how the revolution changed one girl's life.
Gotta laugh. Each portrays Iranians as nonviolent, vulnerable, even victimized by the hostage crisis. "Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the cruelty to which we were subjected," writes Nafisi. "We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive." Indeed, humor is central to these books, ranging from sarcastic to subversive, like when Satrapi's young protagonist acts out torture methods. Often, the comedy is surprisingly Western. In Reading Lolita, Nafisi nods to Jane Austen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a 9-year-old virgin wife."
Collectively, the memoirs demonstrate how "the world has suddenly legitimized Iranians as contributors to the American melting pot," says Rice professor Naficy. And not just with kebabs and Persian rugs. Iranian film, too, has "caught the world by surprise," says Hamid Dabashi, author of Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future. While only in limited release, films such as the Oscar-nominated Children of Heaven, Marzieh Meshkini's The Day I Became a Woman, and Babak Payami's Secret Ballot have garnered critical acclaim: "The humanism portrayed is in such sharp contrast with the public image Americans have of Iran," says Dabashi.
As is Nasim's edgy humor: "This TV, I'm telling you," says the handyman, "it's more dead than Saddam's first defense minister."
This story appears in the September 15, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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