Identità in transito: prove di riscrittura del sé nella memorialistica e narrativa femminile irano-americana

Before and after the Iranian Revolution, the experience of restrictions and gender confinement drove many Iranian women writers to fight for their forbidden role. What many of them now call their first exile at home went on until the chance of migration, above all to Europe and to the Usa, changed the perils of writing under Iranian censorship into a free, but unbalanced condition aware of cultural dissociations. Those dissociations are not simply due to diasporic estrangement, but to a more confused doubling, which is rooted in a quest for the self that passes through hyphenation and in-betweenness. Moreover, if the veil often emerges as a narrative symbol of women’s oppression, it sometimes acquires the valency of a dramatic “fourth wall”. This thesis aims to overthrow that “invisible wall”, in order to show a relationship between dramatization and new writing by the women of the Iranian diaspora. In line with Brechtian epic drama based on the concept of estrangement, it will explore estrangement both as an existential condition and as the distance required to rewrite the self through new roles. More in detail, if the author lives between two worlds and tries to depict their dualisms, she also becomes the playwright of her past and present selves. The metaphors and dualisms will be examined through a comparison of some memoirs and novels by Iranian-American women writers – such as Azadeh Moaveni, Firoozeh Dumas, Nahid Rachlin, Porochista Khakpour and Azar Nafisi – coming from different generations and cultural heritages. Each narration will be analysed as a dramatic scene of memories and linguistic splits, which dramatize recurring senses of estrangement and turn them into a more “visible wall” of identities in transit.