Writing Back

A couple of decades before 9/11, after the collapse of USSR, Islam started to be culturally represented as the major “Other” in the West. 9/11 attacks accelerated the movement with the “culture talk” project positioning Islam as the backward culture against which the West and secularism are portrayed as the epitome of progressive liberal civilization/culture. Muslims, however, wrote back to the project. Literature, especially fiction, was found an appropriate media through which Muslims’ voice could be expressed. Robin Yassin Kassab’s The Road from Damascus is a true writing back attempt in order to respond to the hegemonic “othering” of Islam in the West. The narrative actualizes the purpose upending the constructed bifurcation of “the West” versus “Islam”. Being approached from a new perspective, both terms/signs are deconstructed in the novel so that the center/periphery opposition is reversed. In this new structure each term/sign is given new significances challenging the mainstream “imagined identities” of Muslims in the West.

This article focuses on Iranian war narratives and the technique of ‘writing back to history’ in Hasanzadeh's This Weblog will be Transferred .(2015) Deploying the neo-left technique of revision and Flanagan’s notion of ‘technorealism’, the writer has tried to discuss how young adult literature can reevaluate the dominant representation of the recorded history. It is argued that the production of a counter-narrative and the illustration of history from a marginalized silenced perspective of the young adult reader have enabled Hasanzadeh to reveal hidden narratives and to re-assess the dominant discourse. As one of few young adult narratives that address the subject of the Iran-Iraq War and the depth of national agony, Hasanzadeh's work distinguishes itself through its use of cyberspace in the representation of war. His work, by incarnating an online platform such as weblogs, inspires a sense of collectivity that most war narratives strive for. This sense is inspired through many intertexts woven into the fabric of the narrative. Along completing and expanding the scope of the main narrative, these intertexts incorporate an intimate tone and elicit empathy and identification from the young adult reader. Furthermore, they create a kind of multi-perspectivism that not only challenges the monolithic narrative of the war in Iran but also corrects and shapes the public's perception of the impacts of war on a nation. The result is an alternative vision of the past that fights the misuse of national memory and the creation of a better sense of the inherited world for young adult reader.