Alienated Memories: Reconstructing the Self in Autobiographical Writings of Diasporic Iranian Women

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This thesis will analyse diasporic memoirs by Iranian women writers, emphasizing the role of life-writing in healing traumatic memories. The bilingual women I study affiliate to two distinct cultures (the US and Iran). These writers restore traumatic memories in Persian and English, in so doing negotiating conflicted bicultural subjectivities shaped by their diasporic condition. Narrating intrusive traumatic memories of immigration in a different language can therapeutically reshape them. On the other hand, language loss and deterritorialization, which are among the traumatic consequences of immigration, may result in further displacement. Additionally, these writers are doubly displaced both as immigrants and women due to the discursive conflict between Iranian and adopted American cultural definitions of female identity. In order to make sense of their life stories and to resolve their conflicts, these writers (re)construct their identities by narrating bilingual autobiographical memories. I wish to investigate the consequences of self-fashioning and narration of diasporic traumatic memories in my selected texts. I will explore how by remembering and narrating memories in general (termed 'scriptotherapy' by Hanke [1998]), and by doing so in a language other than the one in which they were inscribed, in particular, the subject therapeutically distances herself from the authenticity of traumatic language-dependent memories.