Learning to be An American

Abstract

As a white, American wife of an Iranian, I spent several months in Iran in 1979 and again in 1987. My experiences on these trips to my husband's home were profound and devastating. These experiences deeply troubled my understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of the United States. In this autoethnographic narrative, I work between experience, people's history, published history, theory, and poetry to trouble my position as an American.