By Lily Jamali
Daily Bruin Contributor
Many Middle Eastern women experience feelings of nostalgia upon
leaving their homelands, whether they leave willingly or due to
exile, according to two studies presented Friday at the Faculty
Center.
A colloquium, titled “Gender and Diaspora: The Middle East
and Beyond” featured two professors who presented their
research on the issue of displacement.
English Professor Ali Behdad hosted the discussion, which drew
an audience of about 25.
“I think that gender oppression is an issue that is
central for these women,” Behdad said. “Often, coming
abroad is a way of creating new identities and new
sexualities.”
Although Middle Eastern women made up most of the audience, a
handful of men came to listen to the lectures and participate in
discussion afterward.
“This was interesting to me because it made me think of my
mom a lot,” said Mike Marzban, a fourth-year American
literature and culture student whose mother left Iran when she was
18 years old.
“As a woman, my mom probably had a tougher time adjusting
than my dad because of gender and ethnic biases,” he
said.
In her talk, Halleh Ghorashi, addressed struggles similar to
those she faced herself after leaving Iran in 1988. After growing
up in Iran, she had to leave her home country for political
reasons.
“As a student, I was in a Marxist organization,”
said Ghorashi, a professor of anthropology at the Free University
in Amsterdam. “I came to the Netherlands as a political
refugee.”
Ghorashi studied the experience of females who had to leave Iran
because of their left-wing political activism. Her research, which
earned her a doctorate in anthropology, compares the experience of
Iranian women who settled in Los Angeles with those settled in the
Netherlands.
In the Netherlands, she found that most of the immigrants she
interviewed experienced a great deal of nostalgia, which Ghorashi
attributes to a lack of social cohesion among Persian settlers
there. She contrasted this with the experience of Los Angeles
settlers who benefit from an extensive network of Persians in L.A.,
which is often dubbed “Tehrangeles” among Iranian
Americans.
“For those settlers, the return home is a huge part of the
migrant idea,” Ghorashi said of Persians now residing in the
Netherlands. “So they construct a sense of belonging in the
past.”
Because the women Ghorashi interviewed for her research are
exiles, they do not have the option to go back to their homeland.
As a result, these women regard their home as an Iran of the past,
a place which no longer exists, especially for those who left
during the Revolution of 1979.
“An imagined Iran feels more like Iran than
post-revolutionary Islamic Iran,” Ghorashi said.
Karen Leonard, a professor of anthropology at UC Irvine, also
presented her research which examined Indian and Pakistani women
who moved to the Gulf states with their husbands.
According to Leonard, heads of families from South Asia often
move to the affluent Gulf region in order to make a better living
than they would at home.
Leonard did her research in August of 1995, during the hottest
season of the year when temperatures reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit
in the Gulf region. She interviewed Indian and Pakistani women in
Kuwait City and Dubai, two affluent cities with economies which
operate around regional oil resources.
“As citizens prosper, the Gulf states increasingly rely on
outsiders to do the work,” Leonard said, pointing out that
Kuwaitis provide only one sixth of the workforce in their own
country.
“These women think they are just going to be there
briefly,” Leonard said of professional South Asian women who
have relocated with their families to the Gulf.
“In fact, it turns out to be a very traumatic, dislocating
experience for them,” Leonard said, discussing feelings of
home-sickness and depression that accompany their displacement from
home.
After the lecturers presented their findings, Nayereh Tohidi, a
professor of women’s studies at CSU Northridge discussed the
research and raised the question of how the male immigrant
experience compared to the female experience.
Afshin Matin, a teacher of history at CSU Long Beach said he
could relate to the feeling of exile from one’s homeland that
the women in the studies shared.
“For a long time, I couldn’t go back to Iran,”
Matin said. “I had the feeling of exile. But during the past
four or five years, there has been some relaxation of political
controls that allowed me to go back,” Matin said.
“Then I began to realize that I have a choice,”
Matin added. “I decided that for now, home is in the
U.S.”