Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies

Diaspora 1:3 1991 The Poetics and Practice of Iranian Nostalgia in Exile Hamid Naficy University of California, Los Angeles 1. Nostalgia as Cultural Practice In this article, I will focus on the poetics and practice of nostalgia in exilic popular culture, drawing primarily on examples from some 10 years of Iranian television programs and music videos produced in Los Angeles. Nostalgia, a feature of exile, has in recent years become a "cultural practice" and a "mode of representation" (K. Stewart 227, 238) as postmodernity, neocolonialism, communism, totalitarianism, imperialism, and transnational capital have displaced peoples and cultures the world over. Fredric Jameson tells us that this fragmentation and deterritorialization forces us to experience time differently; that is, we experience the present as a loss or, as Baudrillard would have it, as a phenomenon that has no origin or reality, a "hyperreality" (2). For the exiles who have emigrated from Third World countries, life in the United States, especially in the quintessentially postmodern city of Los Angeles, is doubly unreal, and it is because of this double loss—of origin and of reality—that nostalgia becomes a major cultural and representational practice among the exiles. In addition, nostalgia for one's homeland has a fundamentally interpsychic source expressed in the trope ofan eternal desire for return—a return that is structurally unrealizable. Freud speaks of homesickness as a longing for a return to the womb of the motherland, and Jane Gallop asserts: If we understand the nostalgia resulting from the discovery of the mother's castration in this way, then the discovery that the mother does not have the phallus means that the subject can never return to the womb. Somehow the fact that the mother is not phallic means that the mother as mother is lost forever, that the mother as womb, homeland, source, and grounding for the subject is irretrievably past. The subject is hence in a foreign land, alienated. (148) 285 Diaspora 1:3 1991 Although the lost mother is structurally irretrievable, the lost homeland is potentially recoverable and it is this potentiality—however imaginary—that drives the exiles' multifaceted desire to return. 2. Return to the Origin For some, separation from and loss of the homeland is a deliberate choice that indicates a desire to escape from the ravages of both a patriarchal family and a social order prevalent in the home country . For many, however, grief over forced separation and loss is unresolvable and thus leads to depression and dysphoria (Good, Good, and Moradi 391). As I have argued elsewhere ("Televisual"), some people disavow loss and separation either through creating and controlling fetishes or creating and submitting to fetishes. For others, the disavowal of loss and separation is supplanted by an impulse to return, to reunite with the object ofthe fetish, the (motherland ; to regress into the prelapsarian narcissism of childhood; to reestablish the communal self. This is a characteristic that sets exiles apart from all other displaced people, such as expatriates and immigrants. Indeed, "exile is a dream of glorious return" (Rushdie 205), a dream that as Freud and Lacan predicted remains alluring only as long as it remains unrealized. We must consider the paradigm of exile as it operates within the exiles' native culture, because it is through that paradigm that they think and experience their lives in exile. For Iranians, it is poetry, especially sufi (mystic) poetry, that provides the paradigmatic worldview and language of exile, embodying a variety of journeys, returns, and unifications. Such an assertion may seem implausible to readers unfamiliar with Iranian culture; certainly, a similar claim about any contemporary western culture would not be upheld. However, as historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and any number of Iranians can attest, theirs is a culture suffused by poetry and shaped by the citation of canonical, classical (and at times contemporary ) poets in daily life; rich and poor can and do cite Ferdowsi , Sa'adi, Hafez, Rumi, and Khayyam. The paradigm of exile is indissolubly linked with the Hejri calendar, the Iranian version of the Muslim Hijrah (hegira), dating from the prophet Mohammad's emigration to Medina, which was followed some years later by a triumphant return to Mecca. The exiled poet Nader...