37 pages • 1 hour read
Firoozeh DumasFunny In Farsi
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Iranian Revolution
The memoir spans several time periods. The Jazayeri family first emigrated to the US in 1972, and Dumas recalls that most Americans at that time received them warmly. The family’s first experience was very different from their time in the US after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, an uprising in which the Shah was deposed and replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Shah was favored by the American government and was generally a Western-friendly leader; the Ayatollah regime was not. One of the critical developments of the Iranian Revolution was the capture of more than 60 Americans who were taken from the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran, on November 4, 1979, as hostages. The militants’ storming of the embassy took place just after the Shah arrived in New York for cancer treatment, and many claimed that the hostages would be held until the Shah was returned to Iran, where he would face execution at the hands of the new regime.
The crisis lasted 444 days and had particularly far-reaching impacts in the US. It significantly influenced the outcome of the 1980 US presidential election between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and the hostages were released minutes after Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. Open hostility toward Iranians and overt discrimination against Iranian immigrants socially and in employment and education became common during the hostage crisis.
Cultural Context: “Secular Islamism”
Cultural diversity features prominently in the book, and many episodes reveal how Dumas and her family preserve their traditions while integrating new American customs into their lives. Dumas refers to her family as primarily “secular Muslims”—less observant or more liberal Muslims. The tension between more secular views, like her family’s, versus fundamentalist practices of Islam led to the Iranian Revolution, as the liberal, pro-Western Shah became unpopular with a growing orthodox, theocratic movement. Certain practices and traditions rooted in these cultural tensions are prominent in the book. For example, women have a subservient role in society and are generally not afforded the same educational and career opportunities as men. There is a significant section of the book that describes why eating ham is forbidden by Islam and how Dumas’s father manages to rationalize his penchant for eating it. The Islamic holy text, the Quran, is mentioned sporadically in the memoir, but none of its passages is specifically detailed.
Cultural comparisons are also made between Christmas and Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, a celebration of spring that is similar in scope to the role of Christmas in the US. In response to being left out of Christmas because of her religion, Dumas befriends Jewish students in her neighborhood in California. She shows how she was raised to practice Islam while respecting other faiths (105). Dumas makes many references to the ways Iranians value education and family, as each forms a critical component of that country’s cultural identity. Dumas marries a Catholic man from France, and a priest performs the ceremony while a large contingent of Iranian family members is in attendance.
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