Anticipated by few foreign experts, this revolution had been a popular uprising against the then ruling Shah by a multitude of groups. Religious people, conservatives, socialists, Marxists, feminists, and the clergy alike joined forces for a limited time to oust the monarch. Considered a Western puppet, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was despised for his lavish spending and his imposing of Western values. While the country was growing richer, society’s expectations grew faster and led to disenchantment with the Shah’s promises of social improvement; people from rural backgrounds flooded the cities in hope of a better life and formed a huge impoverished working class that saw nothing of the money that was made selling Iran’s oil reserves.

Before and during the revolution, royalists and those who were perceived to be sympathizing with the monarchy fled the country, along with cautious members of religious minorities who had enjoyed comparative freedom under the Shah and now feared persecution. These groups sometimes took vast amounts of assets with them, which enabled them to establish themselves abroad quickly. In the later days of the revolution, when the clergy under Khomeini started to gain more power, their once-allies and now political enemies started to opt for exile, adding a second wave to the already considerable number of Iranians in diaspora. This wave would continue throughout the Iran–Iraq war with young men dodging the draft and people migrating due to the bad economy well into the 1990s, when, under the more relaxed government of president Khamenei, it slowly abated.

No matter under what circumstances individual subjects came to be part of the Iranian diaspora in the United States, though: Leaving Iran is the one event that is key to their past and present. Life-changing, departure calls for an explanation, demands a central position in the subject’s life narrative and the subject’s positioning toward its politics. Of course, this plays out very differently for the first generation, who left Iran on their own account, and for the 1.5th and second generation, who did not have to make the momentous decision of leaving the home country. The first generation, then, has much more to come to terms with, has the burden of responsibility, which is why I will exemplarily analyze the narratives of Azar Nafisi, Nahid Rachlin, Farideh Goldin, Roya Hakakian, and Abbas Milani here. Autobiographers who had left earlier, like Mahmoud Sarram and Shahab Nahvi, seem not to experience the same guilt and focus much more on how they “made it” in the United States.

Not reading these self-narratives as ethnographic representations, I argue that it is the autobiographers’ very selection of themes that speaks for itself, as they comply with Jerome Bruner’s concept of “victimicy:” “If our Self-concept cannot be constructed by assembling and conceptualizing instances of our own agentive acts, then it can be constructed according to the same principle by attributing it to the agency of another” (Bruner 1994:41, emphasis original). Iranian-American autobiographers cannot attribute their departure to their own volition, as the guilt of leaving one’s home country in times of distress is considerable and can lead to questions of legitimacy regarding identity. Instead, I argue, they construct their narratives to show that their departure was forced—by discrimination, misogynism, and oppressive traditionalism. As a result, the victimicy narrative becomes the sanctioned form of remembering departure in the Iranian diaspora and becomes a powerful definition of diasporic identity. What is more, such narratives of victimicy cater to neo-orientalist preconceptions of Iran as a fallen Oriental paradise, irrational and aggressive.

Certainly one of the most vocal and outspoken—though herself not uncriticized—critics of the Islamic Revolution (and the IRI) is Nafisi. She portrays the clergy’s rise to power as distinctly involving confiscation and theft of identity: “My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country“ (2004:76). As a result, the subject becomes past-less and its life and identity is no longer whole. Already in Iran, she is in exile and the act of emigration is only a fulfillment of what had already been done to her by the revolution and its leaders.

While Nafisi is criticizing the theocratic regime, she also goes to great pains to “prove” that her feelings are shared by pious Iranians, too. Her exhibits are, as everywhere in her novelistic memoir, her students—in this case, the two religious ones, Mahshid and Yassi, whose selves are shown to be turned inconsequential by the now-obligatory veil. Nafisi suggests that, having worn the headscarf already before the revolution, Mahshid may have been ostracized then, but that her sacrifice set her apart and gave her a voice and identity. However, with the revolution enforcing the garment, “her action became meaningless” (13), the veil ubiquitous, her identity as a voluntarily religious person invisible. Nafisi insinuates that the regime has taken away at least part of the relevance the headscarf had had for Mahshid’s self, making her religious self invisible and irrelevant instead of fostering it.

A little later, Nafisi writes about her student Yassi, whose religious family “felt the Islamic Republic was a betrayal of Islam rather than its assertion” (31). Yassi, too, is portrayed as being defined by the imposition of the veil following the revolution: “It was like this veil that meant nothing to her anymore yet without which she would be lost. ( . . . ) She said she could not imagine a Yassi without a veil” (32). Rather than obscuring just her hair, the veil seems to be obscuring Yassi’s personality and becomes the primary characteristic of her identity, even to herself. The rest of her self is, according to Nafisi, rendered irrelevant.

Nafisi stresses, though, that it is not the veil itself that she dislikes—indeed she mentions nostalgically her grandmother’s chador (192)—but the confiscation of her identity as an individual in favor of an Islamic ideal: “No, ( . . . ) it was not that piece of cloth that I rejected, it was the transformation being imposed upon me that made me look in the mirror and hate the stranger I had become.” Not only is the transformation forceful, Nafisi describes Khomeini as “blind” (165) and with that adds a layer of arbitrariness to the revolution. It is out of touch with the reality of normal, everyday Iranians and, as such, a fiction that has been forced into existence. Nafisi repeatedly underlines how she felt “fictional” during her time in the Islamic Republic. The author portrays herself as passive and victimized here; she feels “light” as her substance has been taken away from her, and her self has been “erased” (167). Her subjectivity seems to vanish, leaving only the pod of a woman as imagined by the theocracy.

The climax of Nafisi’s victimicy narrative is when she narrates how she starts to actively erase her self: “Gradually, I pretended that when I wore the robe, my whole body disappeared: my arms, breasts, stomach and legs melted and disappeared and what was left was a piece of cloth the shape of my body” (167f.). Marking a turn to inner exile, she presents herself as so completely dominated by the regime of the IRI that there is no other way but to fictionalize herself: “I decided to make my body invisible. The woman’s coarse hands were reverse X-rays that left only the surface intact and made the inside invisible. By the time she had finished inspecting me, I had become as light as the wind, a fleshless, boneless being.” Nafisi takes her narration of victimicy to the top by telling the reader how she, eventually, even questioned her own existence: “Sometimes, almost unconsciously, I would withdraw my hands into my wide sleeves and start touching my legs or my stomach. ( . . . ) Do I exist?” (168).

But not only in Nafisi’s memoir do selves become irrelevant and even seem to disappear: Hakakian describes the attitude of the theocratic regime to its everyday subjects and their past as outright warfare: “To cleanse the city of any lingering ‘decadence’ of the old monarchs, the imam declared the greatest jihad of all: the one against the ‘self’” (2004:201). Similarly to Nafisi, Hakakian positions the revolution and its eventual leaders in direct opposition to individuality. She presents the situation as a Manichaean distinction between good and evil—the Islamic revolutionaries being the enemy, of course: “A new line, invisible but terribly palpable, was drawn. On one side of it, they stood. On the other, we. ( . . . ) They began their speeches in the name of Allah. We began ours with good old God. They called themselves the ‘faithful.’ We called ourselves Iranians” (202). Hakakian’s “we” here again insinuates that all “normal” Iranians, including the privately religious, have been subject to this new categorization. She fashions their individual identities to have been rendered void; all that matters now is the confrontation of ordinary Iranians against the thugs of the clergy—victims and oppressors.

Like Nafisi, Hakakian seems to be of the opinion that ordinary Iranians have to shed the garments enforced by the revolution and the IRI in order to become individuals: “She ( . . . ) stood up to take off her veil and scarf. I took off my scarf, too. And doing so, we peeled away the years to become ‘us’ again” (217). In Hakakian’s construction, hidden beneath the layers of forced de-individualization are people’s “real” selves, which they can only exercise in the privacy of their homes.

Goldin constructs this environment as so hostile that she recognizes herself in the calf that her family sacrifices: “I felt as if my own body was being torn apart. ( . . . ) My mother made kabob for us, but I couldn’t eat. It was cannibalism, eating my own flesh. My grandmother broke the legs with a hammer, took the hooves off, and made my favorite stew. My broken legs; I couldn’t eat” (2003:166). Again, a body is vanishing, yet this time in a much more violent fashion. Also, the ones shown to cause the body to disappear are not the revolutionary guards or the clergy, but the author’s own family: For Goldin, what is wrong with her country are Iran’s traditional morals and values. Thus she depicts her own relatives as figuratively breaking her legs and taking away her freedom.

Goldin does not, like Nafisi and Hakakian, narrate her body becoming invisible, but she, too, constructs herself as disconnected from it. Like a stranger, she observes herself from the outside: “This wasn’t my life. I wasn’t living inside my body. I watched myself from above, ( . . . ) an artificial smile on my lips, politely answering questions. Who was that woman? Was it really me?” (166). Goldin explains that, fighting to get outside a crowd that is both harassing her and shouting anti-American slogans, she understands that postrevolutionary Iran is changing her self: “By breathing the hatred hanging in the air, by sharing the uneasiness surrounding me at the house and on the streets, I was being transformed into a person I didn’t know and now didn’t like.” She goes on to explain that this is the reason for her emigration: “I had to leave Iran soon in order to save myself” (183). So in Goldin’s construction, similarly to others, it is the forced change of her identity, the feeling of losing herself and being victimized that makes her leave.

The autobiographers’ approach of narrating tales of victimicy is understandable: The need to explain their departures from their home country—in order to counter (their own) charges of disloyalty—makes them stress how Iran did not feel like home any more, but inauthentic, how they did not feel real and themselves, not even relevant any more. The resulting tales of being a stranger to oneself, of vanishing and dismembered bodies, of individual identities rendered irrelevant are instances of victimicy and mean to make migration the inevitable result. The guilt of having left is thus turned around and given entirely to those who made it impossible to stay after the revolution. What is more, such narratives of victimhood speak to American audiences and are meant to distance Iranian Americans from those who forced the diaspora abroad, thus creating a more positive image for the new ethnic group.

For Jewish authors Goldin and Hakakian, the revolution is inextricably linked with a rise in anti-Semitic sentiments, about which they reflect extensively. Yet their approaches are diametrically opposed: Hakakian conceives of the situation in Shah-time Iran as a dream come true, only to be completely destroyed by the revolution. Jewish Iranians, in her narrative, are integrated in society, but then start to be victimized. Goldin, while also acknowledging the destructive force of the revolution in particular for the Jewish population, sees the grievances in Iranian society more as a result of beliefs and customs deeply engrained in society’s texture. These conservative values and anti-Jewish sentiments are, in her construction, only rekindled by revolutionary religious fervor.

The differences in these two memoirs showcase the heterogeneity of the Iranian Jewish community at...