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In her most recent essay collection, The Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour begins with her family’s riches to rags stories. Having immigrated to California after the 1979 revolution, her parents, who worked at the prestigious Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, left their comfortable life in Tehran for relative poverty in the American west. Like many immigrants, her family was forced to abandon their material wealth and status in their pursuit of the American dream. And thus Porochista Khakpour’s existence as a hyphenated Iranian-American began. She describes growing up as a fairly poor brown girl in Pasadena, other-ed by both the wealthy white population, as well as the ostentatious Iranians in Brentwood and Beverly Hills with flashy clothes, jewelry, and cars.
She expresses her respect for these rich Iranian-Americans, who “beat the Americans at their own game” of excess and frivolity. Khakpour’s identity is clearly shaped by her early proximity to this appearance-obsessed population, as she struggles against elitist America’s total rejection of marginalized communities. She describes the negativity with which her Iranian identity was received, and the many ways that she was discouraged from sharing her culture and identity. After escaping the west coast and attending the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in New York on scholarship, Khakpour describes her struggle to fit into the predominantly white community, where classmates regularly expressed to her that they believe their parents are effectively bankrolling her education.
She writes of the further discrimination she faced in the many periods of violent anti-Iranian sentiment in America, and the everyday experience of casual racism in America, which has only become more visible in the age of social media. She writes about the trauma that this discrimination inflicted on her body, the various health struggles she faced while trying to write and share her work in a world where her voice is rejected. She writes of the violence that racism committed against her mind and body, putting her in life-threatening situations time and time again.
In one of the final essays of the collection, “How to Write Iranian America”, Khakpour writes about what it means to be defined specifically as an Iranian-American writer. Over the years following her novels and her various essays published in prestige publications, she recalls editors contacting her to write about the same issues over and over again. She describes getting messages from various editors at prestigious publications who seemed to think that she only thing she could write about was Iran. She is very conscious of the quandary she found herself in: she is passionate about Iranian stories and passionate about giving voice to and elevating Iranian experiences, but she also wary of being editorially typecast as “the Iranian writer”. She calls her collected essays “a testament to the greatest and worst experience of my life: being a spokesperson for my people, a role I never dreamed of and never asked for. This is my pigeonhole, and this is my legacy….These pieces are my bridge, and they are my cave.”
It has been difficult for Khakpour to navigate the tension between her identity in her writing, and in this collection she weaves together the threads of deep love she has for her culture and the more difficult aspects of being a brown girl in America in the age of 9/11 and Trump’s Muslim Ban. This is an essay collection about identity, and the many masks worn by people—especially people of color—whose identities do not fit into the exclusive narrative promoted by white America. She writes of her fellow Iranians living in America, “I deny the whiteness they claim,” choosing instead the full reality of her identity. Khakpour has curated a collection of explosive essays that take on difficult issues of identity and whitewashing in America.
Further Reading: Porochista Khakpour has written many excellent essays for sites like the New York Times, but if you’re looking for something a little different from this essay collection, check out her memoir Sick, and her two fiction novels: The Last Illusion and Sons and Other Flammable Objects.