Writing Exile in History

As a historian of the Middle East working on the social and urban history of the Middle East, I typically spend my time in the archives going through volumes of population surveys, tax records, legal documents, police and prison registers, and petitions submitted by women, merchants, artisans, slaves, and foreigners to the government. We rarely come across diaries, memoirs or personal correspondence left by the average men and women or even by members of the ruling class. Ours is a culture where the subjective “I” is kept private even in poetry and literature. So, writing memoirs is a recent development (late nineteenth century).I discovered this when I had to go over part of the memoir of my father after he had died. He had left a bag full of scarp notes and a short handwritten memoir of his own childhood in Tabriz, interrupted by a diary of his stay in Chicago when he and my mother visited us every other summer. I noticed, as I read the pages, that the memoir focused on his childhood and that the most important part of his long political life had been self-censored or erased. It was of course a big disappointment for me but I understood that a seasoned activist would not leave a footprint or paper trail in order to protect the surviving family members and friends even after he had passed away. So, when I began writing a personal memoir and family history, I had to make some difficult decisions and adjustments precisely for this reason. I had to decide whether my memoir would focus on the pre or post-revolutionary period and I decided for the former. So, I too began with my childhood in Tabriz following my father’s lead. Although there is now an important genre of memoirs and autobiographies written by Iranians and Iranian women in diaspora, the one book that inspired me most was Nabokov’s Speak, Memory published in the US in the 1960’s. It too focused on the childhood memoir of the author in pre-revolutionary Russia, which he wrote during his exile in Europe and America in the 1940’s and 50’s as he moved from one place to another, mostly from a hotel room. What was most interesting in Nabokov’s memoir to me was that he wrote it on the move and in exile with little access to family records, his hometown, house and family archives. He had to constantly verify and revise facts after checking with his surviving family members to whom he had access. Most importantly, he had to rely on his own fragmented memory and even dreams. I felt a deep sense of connection to Nabokov as I read his childhood memoir, for he too could not go back home and was engaged in the act of “remembering” the fragments of his childhood lost to a revolution from exile in America.“I have before me a large bedraggled scrapbook, bound in black cloth. It contains old documents including diplomas, drafts, diaries, identity cards, penciled notes, and some printed matter, which had been in my mother’s meticulous keeping in Prague until her death there, but then, between 1939 and 1961, went through various vicissitudes. With the aid of those papers and my own recollections, I have composed the following short biography of my father.” Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, An Autobiography Revisited, ( NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966) p. 173.