Flammable Author Refuses to Be Silenced or Pigeonholed

By Ron Hogan on November 19, 2007 11:00 AM

The last time we checked in on Porochista Khakpour, she’d picked up the gauntlet Carolyn See threw down in a negative Washington Post review of Khakpour’s novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, couched in the form of an open letter. “I won’t say it was one of the best things that happened to me,” Khakpour reflected over an iced tea last week, “but I did make so many new friends, especially among other writers.” Though some may have urged her not to respond, that was never a realistic option. “I’m a loudmouth. I’m fiery and opinionated,” she laughed. “And I’m from a country that has had freedom of speech taken away completely. So to tell me I shouldn’t talk back…”

Anyway, that’s so last month. When we met up, Khakpour was focusing most of her energy on a string of upcoming readings, including an event tonight at the Half King where she’ll be speaking with three other Iranian-American writers: Dalia Sofer, Marsha Mehran, and Nahid Rachlin. Khakpour started organizing the event herself, she said, “because I wanted to beat people to it. I knew I was going to be invited to a panel discussion eventually, and I wanted to make sure it was about the differences between us as writers, not about the similarities. I wanted to put a slight dent in the pigeonholing.”

Khakpour’s concern speaks to the recent uptick of interest in Iranian writers, especially women, in recent years. She and Sofer have already been linked together in a Radar photoshoot of (mostly) foreign-born women writers living and publishing in the States, and other newspapers and magazines have written about the trend or have stories in the works. When Gina Nahai was in New York last month, touring for her new novel, Caspian Rain, she also addressed the hundreds of Iranian-themed books published in the last decade: “There’s both too many and not enough books being published,” she said. “The possible downside is that publishers may flood the market with a certain type of book, and when they don’t fulfill expectations, the publishers pull back. I’m fortunate to have been around long enough [as a writer] that I hopefully wouldn’t get caught up in that.” (Khakpour says she was very eager to have Nahai in the lineup for her event, but their schedules were unable to intersect.)

In some important ways, however, Khakpour and Sofer already breaking free of the trap of having her work considered only for their background. “I like that [our books] have been taken seriously as works of literary fiction, instead of just focusing on our stories,” she says. “Thank God Dalia was able to get people talking about craft.” But the “Iranian thing” does still trail after Khakpour, sometimes annoyingly so. Her publication date, for example, was the same day that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia. “Suddenly, I had to talk about him all the time,” she recalled. “I went from being apologetic—not all Iranians are like that—to flippant—you know what? He’s not my boyfriend; I don’t have that much insight into him. How many American writers get asked all the time what they think about George W. Bush?” So now you know what not to ask if you’re heading to tonight’s discussion…