Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour
Review of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour
Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour (2020). Published by Vintage.
I will admit, I picked up this book with a specific intention. As an Iranian-American woman myself, I knew of Porochista Khakpour’s work and how she was, essentially, one of the first women in the diaspora to really kick off a career as a writer. Have I read any of her work before this? No, not really. So when I saw this surprisingly in the humor section of my library, I did a double-take and picked it up. After reading it, I can now confirm that this 100% is not a humor book and that my library kind of needs to fix their categorizing of books if this was in the humor section.
Anyways, I come into this reading with expectations of what I’m going to see. I’m an Iranian-American from a similar background of Khakpour. My family lost everything in the revolution. And so when I pick up a book like this, I think I’m going to come in with a critical background when it comes to the history and how things are depicted, because this is a reality I, and so many other non-rich Iranian immigrants in the United States, have gone through.
Le't’s dive into this review!
Book Blurb
*A Vintage Original*
From the much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a beautifully rendered, poignant collection of personal essays, chronicling immigrant and Iranian-American life in our contemporary moment.
Novelist Porochista Khakpour's family moved to Los Angeles after fleeing the Iranian Revolution, giving up their successes only to be greeted by an alienating culture. Growing up as an immigrant in America means that one has to make one's way through a confusing tangle of conflicting cultures and expectations. And Porochista is pulled between the glitzy culture of Tehrangeles, an enclave of wealthy Iranians and Persians in LA, her own family's modest life and culture, and becoming an assimilated American. Porochista rebels—she bleaches her hair and flees to the East Coast, where she finds her community: other people writing and thinking at the fringes. But, 9/11 happens and with horror, Porochista watches from her apartment window as the towers fall. Extremism and fear of the Middle East rises in the aftermath and then again with the election of Donald Trump. Porochista is forced to finally grapple with what it means to be Middle-Eastern and Iranian, an immigrant, and a refugee in our country today.
Brown Album is a stirring collection of essays, at times humorous and at times profound, drawn from more than a decade of Porochista's work and with new material included. Altogether, it reveals the tolls that immigrant life in this country can take on a person and the joys that life can give.
Content
This is an essay collection by Khakpour, some in which the essays are published in literary magazines, others that are completely new and are seeing the world for the first time. It kind of follows an arc of a memoir, as we go from Khakpour’s childhood where they leave everything they own behind in Tehran during 1980, how her family moves to Los Angeles, her upbringing as an Iranian-American that wasn’t wealthy, and how she came to be a writer at Sarah Lawrence College. To be frank, I think I would’ve preferred this book to be a memoir about her experience, because the essay format wasn’t doing it for me. There’s random interruptions with Iranian history that someone like me would already know. And, what would make this most memoir-like already, is that this is a very self-indulgent book.
When I say self-indulgent, I think of books like Crying in H Mart. Crying in H Mart is a very self-indulgent memoir because the author tends to focus on themselves and not society as a large, making it seem like a very me, me, me book. And I guess you have to be this way in CNF, because there is no other choice. But I genuinely wanted to see more of how Khakpour interacted with others based on her identity. She does all this discussion about how she changes herself to fit in, but the most meaningful interaction in the book is the one with the old man in the Deep South who seems to think she’s Italian.
I think Khakpour does a good job humanizing herself as a flawed human being, because man she becomes kind of unlikeable towards the end. We have the instances where she’s got the teenage angst and classic rebellion against her parents, but then, as she grows older, she reflects on, for example, how she lied to people about how she had missing friends in the Twin Towers during 9/11. I like how she acknowledges the fact that 9/11 was an extremely shifting moment for her personally and for her career, because she was indeed first known as a 9/11 writer.
She also tries to portray herself as often being something she isn’t. She describes herself as a queer woman, but then we only get mentions of boyfriend and heterosexual normality in these essays. There’s young adult behavior that can be chalked up to being young and stupid, such as the drugs and rejecting Islam, but rejecting your Iranian identity and claiming you’re half-Black is a whole different level. As someone who grew up in an Iranian diaspora community, this is particularly problematic because of the way that Afro-Iranians in Iranian society (they exist, they’re in the South part of Iran) are rejected and not depicted in media. Many Iranians I know personally from the old homeland are pretty racist and colorist (the older ones in my community).
There’s all this discussion about how Iranian people are hated in the United States, which is very true, but I also don’t think she acknowledges the sheer level of privilege that comes with being Iranian here as well. Iranians are some of the most-established immigrant communities when it comes to education and support networks, and she grew up in Los Angeles, not the boonies. She also acknowledges how her family was well-off in Iran, but that’s how they got out. If they were normal Iranians they wouldn’t have been able to get out of there and live comfortable lives in Los Angeles.
Also think that you can’t hash out again and again about how you hate writing about Iranian-American and then keep writing about it. You’re making money off of it.
Overall Thoughts
I don’t think I was the target audience for this, or that Iranians were the target audience in general. I felt alienated from Khakpour as I kept reading through and felt like the narrative pandered to what people expect of troubled diaspora kids—having their rough phase with drugs and pretending you’re someone you’re not, then suddenly becoming a devout Muslim again who’s proud of their heritage. Her writing is good, I’ll give her that. It’s clear and succinct. But this was a little too self-indulgent for me.
Find the book here on Goodreads.
