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ABSTRACT
In this paper I explore the self-narrated life stories of Azar Nafisi, Marjane Satrapi and Azadeh Moaveni by focusing on "home" as a central metaphor. Each of these ltfe stories is embedded to a specific exilic experience of transmigration, which shaped the author's perception of "home." A prominent characteristic of these autobiographical narratives, transmigration encompasses practices of circulating or commuting every few years between the country of origin and host countries, as well as maintaining cultural traditions and close connections with kinship networks. Drawing on real and imagined spaces called "home" as the frame of current discussion has two main purposes. First, it keeps the focus on how the concept and sense of home metaphorically change, rearticulated and reformulated across time and place. Second, it allows for elaboration of how transmigration obscures the contours of modern home and exile, thus constructing the former as temporal and portable.
Home and multiple exiles
Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003a), Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series (2003a, 2004)1 and Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad (2005) have become by now hallmarks in an expanding pantheon of Anglo-Francophone autobiographical narratives written by immigrant women of Iranian origin. From 1997 to 2007, Iranian women exiles published more volumes of autobiographies and memoirs than in any previous period. The commercial success of these narratives, especially in the U.S. and Europe, has directed attention to Iranian diasporic literature in particular, and to "Iranian exile cultural production" in general, over toe past decade (Malek, 2006:355). These three self-narratives have also contributed to growing scholarly attention to, and a discussion of, Iranian diasporic communities (Bahramitash, 2005; Corbella, 2006; Davis, 2005; Elabi, 2006; Mozaffari, 2006; Rahimieh, 2007; Rastegar, 2006).
Despite their distinct experiences and circumstances, Nafisi's and Satrapi's autobiographies share several notable traits of involuntary and voluntiuy exile. Each of them also applies distinguished professional merits to her particular memoirs - Nafisi as a literary scholar and Sadapi as a graphic illustrator and animator. Throughout their upbringing in Tehran, Nafisi (b. 1955) and Satrapi (b. 1969) acquued a Western-style education and, as young adolescents, were sent by their parents, under different conditions, to Europe. With the completion of then studies abroad, they settled back in Iran, yet local turbulences under the Islamic Republic eventually led them...