Fake Farsi: Formulaic Flexibility in Iranian American Women's Memoir

Abstract

In her memoir To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America, Tara Bahrampour, an Iranian American journalist known for her writing in popular press on Iran and Iranian Americans, describes what she calls Farsi, an improvisational language game that she and her brother played as children. (1) To play game, she pretends sound just like Iranian TV broadcasters who string together unending chains of complicated words announce news. This game involves phonetic play within rules of grammar, a testing of possibilities within clearly understood boundaries. Bahrampour explains, we make up Farsi-sounding sentences, keeping all same pauses and inflections. She recalls reproducing the formal pronunciation I've only heard from newscasters and from Iranians reciting poetry. She even offers a sample of fake Farsi in italics. After real Persian phrase, Salaam beenandegaan-e aziz [Hello, dear viewers], and date, Bahrampour launches into a long sentence of Persian-sounding gibberish: Behdaayat-e mafianboolian, baad az forojamegaanha-ye khaghenaammat-e ... and so on (57). The structure remains grammatically correct but words make no sense. Young Tara strips signifier from signified, producing a language that is more somatic than semantic, more music than meaning. (2) However, this verbal game does have its ideological signification as a performative reworking of a formal, rule-bound apparatus and a ritualized yet flexible performance of national identity: national television news broadcast and recitation of classical poetry, respectively. By copying styles of these two modes produce a language without content, Bahrampour enacts a performative parody of national identity. (3) The discourse of television news, broadcast across national space at a specific time of day, produces national identity horizontally as an imagined community across geographical locations. The formal recitation of poetry, steeped as it is in work of Iran's great national poets Hafez and Sa'di, produces national identity vertically as an imagined community in time. As Roya Hakakian recalls in her own memoir, Journey from Land of No: to engage in national pastime, declaiming poetry, especially in presence of an elder pro like Father, was foolish (69). On her lather's mantelpiece would be a volume of Hafez's collected poetry, just as certainly as there was a flag in every schoolyard, equal tokens of patriotism (70). As a performance of identity through play with language, fake Farsi simultaneously destabilizes signification and yet signifies very forms and formalities of Iranian national identity. In this sense, take Farsi is a kind of Persian blues. Like jam sessions derived from a fake book in which a musician deconstructs and reconstitutes an old standard, reworking tonal meanings of popular songs, fake Farsi takes formal structures and reworks them into an improvisational reinvention of original. This kind of rifting on language is an important part of literary constructions of ethnicity in United States. (4) In Lost in Translation, for example, Eva Hoffman uses riff as a way of understanding improvisation of a new self in a new language. Unlike formal freedom associated with jazz, blues is grounded in formulaic structures and stock phrases. (5) It is up blues player rework and reinvent these standardized modes. Hoffman describes rift as an all-American form, shape that language takes when it's not held down by codes of class, or rules of mannerliness, or a common repertory of inherited (218). In both American blues and Persian classical music, improvisation and composition are indistinguishable. Ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin has shown that the creation of new phrases [in Iranian classical music performance] involves much more than simple substitution of one formula for another, namely, continuous negotiation of a network of choices in which formulas themselves have a flexibility not usually associated with term (270). …