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giovannigf's review
Maybe it’s not fair of me to judge this collection of light, humorous essays harshly, but I felt misled by the Joan Didion riff of the title and the promise of something more substantial of the subtitle. I’m sure I would have enjoyed (and quickly forgotten) the pieces if I had run into them individually, but they grew tiresome very quickly as a group.
bibliocyclist's review
dark
emotional
medium-paced
3.0
It’s the 1980s in southern California, where you and your parents have recently arrived. What is the difference between “Iranian” and “Persian,” and which do you use to self-identify? What is it like to know there is a huge, wealthy diaspora from your homeland just forty-five minutes away in “Tehrangeles,” blithely bleaching their hair and buying Bijan, while your downwardly-mobile clan in south Pasadena can barely afford a must-have Christmas Cabbage Patch doll? How do you cope when no one, not even your own people, can pronounce your name, when William Faulkner’s elderly nephew believes you are an Italian publisher named Pia and that he would sweep you off your feet if not for that pesky half-century age gap? To find out, read Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour, grapple with what it means to feel brown when most of the world, your own family included, sees you as white, and always remember that “true Cabbage Patch Kids, the real ones, come with butt tattoos.”
curiousreader's review
4.0
First published on my blog: https://curiousreaderr.wordpress.com/2020/04/25/essays-of-an-iranian-american-life-brown-album-by-porochista-khakpour/
Brown Album collects Porochista Khakpour’s essays exploring identity and expression, growing up, creative writing and loving stories, America and 9/11, and mental health, among myriad of things. She opens the book with positioning herself as an Iranian-American writer, having unwittingly become a kind of representative of Iranians in America or in the West generally, particularly as immigrants and within a setting where these two identities have long been at odds with one another. Being asked to write about various topics related to Iranian-American lives and stories, she’d found herself “a spokesperson of my people“. This essay collection then is in great part dealing with this identity split – Iran and America having a rocky history, hardly less so after 9/11, explaining perhaps some of the authors obsession with this event in history and trying to grapple with its shockwaves many years ahead in her fiction writing. Khakpour describes herself as a novelist but I thought she excelled as an essayist – raising questions of importance without preaching, through the grounded nature of weaving in personal experiences with rawness and allowing for sharp introspections and honest ambiguities; her story-telling really resonated with me on a personal level as a part-Iranian reader but equally allowed me to reflect on things I hadn’t heard anyone questioning before.
In one of the earliest essays she attempts to confront the split of Iran’s identity as part of a dreamscape “Persia”, with rich art and history; in contrast to the country’s bleak present and conflicted relationship within and outside its national boundaries. “In the beginning there was the word… Persian“. Its connotations of all that is good about a country in a single word, as a strategic distancing from that four-letter name suggesting hostage crisis, terrorists, islamists, suspicion. As much as she questions some of the country’s identity crisis, she shares some of her personal journey in figuring out who she was – as an immigrant of two identities especially as she had few memories of Iran, having moved as a three year old – she describes some of the mixed feelings she has of her own legacy, how she relates to her parents’ background, political stance, attitude towards their new homeland, and where they belong. Her story of coming of age is increasingly complicated with some health issues that shapes many of her life decisions and paths taken. She finds a particular sense of purpose and connection through books and story-telling, she shares this passion through some of her journey into becoming a teacher of creative writing and a published author.
I thought this was a wonderful book that really illustrates on the one hand the wider experience of being an immigrant or child of immigrants stuck in between two cultures and identities – never quite belonging to either; as well as the more specific relationship she has with her birth country – a relationship that she continues to make sense of through the writing of this book. A wonderful, thoughtful and in my opinion, highly eye-opening book about some of the experiences of someone both being able to “pass” and being judged as “other” in the country they have made their own. “I accepted it [America] and never, until much later, considered that it might not accept me”.
Brown Album collects Porochista Khakpour’s essays exploring identity and expression, growing up, creative writing and loving stories, America and 9/11, and mental health, among myriad of things. She opens the book with positioning herself as an Iranian-American writer, having unwittingly become a kind of representative of Iranians in America or in the West generally, particularly as immigrants and within a setting where these two identities have long been at odds with one another. Being asked to write about various topics related to Iranian-American lives and stories, she’d found herself “a spokesperson of my people“. This essay collection then is in great part dealing with this identity split – Iran and America having a rocky history, hardly less so after 9/11, explaining perhaps some of the authors obsession with this event in history and trying to grapple with its shockwaves many years ahead in her fiction writing. Khakpour describes herself as a novelist but I thought she excelled as an essayist – raising questions of importance without preaching, through the grounded nature of weaving in personal experiences with rawness and allowing for sharp introspections and honest ambiguities; her story-telling really resonated with me on a personal level as a part-Iranian reader but equally allowed me to reflect on things I hadn’t heard anyone questioning before.
In one of the earliest essays she attempts to confront the split of Iran’s identity as part of a dreamscape “Persia”, with rich art and history; in contrast to the country’s bleak present and conflicted relationship within and outside its national boundaries. “In the beginning there was the word… Persian“. Its connotations of all that is good about a country in a single word, as a strategic distancing from that four-letter name suggesting hostage crisis, terrorists, islamists, suspicion. As much as she questions some of the country’s identity crisis, she shares some of her personal journey in figuring out who she was – as an immigrant of two identities especially as she had few memories of Iran, having moved as a three year old – she describes some of the mixed feelings she has of her own legacy, how she relates to her parents’ background, political stance, attitude towards their new homeland, and where they belong. Her story of coming of age is increasingly complicated with some health issues that shapes many of her life decisions and paths taken. She finds a particular sense of purpose and connection through books and story-telling, she shares this passion through some of her journey into becoming a teacher of creative writing and a published author.
I thought this was a wonderful book that really illustrates on the one hand the wider experience of being an immigrant or child of immigrants stuck in between two cultures and identities – never quite belonging to either; as well as the more specific relationship she has with her birth country – a relationship that she continues to make sense of through the writing of this book. A wonderful, thoughtful and in my opinion, highly eye-opening book about some of the experiences of someone both being able to “pass” and being judged as “other” in the country they have made their own. “I accepted it [America] and never, until much later, considered that it might not accept me”.
miguelf's review
2.0
Very inward looking, Brown Album is a mishmash of various essays revolving around the author’s experience growing up and living in the US as an Iranian immigrant. It seems much to her annoyance that she has to dwell on her origin, yet this seems to take up the bulk of the book’s contents for good or bad. There’s quite a bit of navel gazing going on, and it’s difficult to get deeply involved in passages about changing one’s hair color to blonde, although to be fair this does seem to preoccupy many people in how others perceive their outward appearance. The latter sections touch on race, although not deeply.
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