Funny In Farsi -Writer’s Tone
I’ve only just begun the book, but I’ve already laughed at least 20 times. Dumas has a really fun, witty way of telling her stories. She uses phrases like “two left tongues”, that really make you giggle, and even more so because I can relate to her stories. When she talks about something about the Iranian culture, I almost always laugh along, because yes that’s so true, even though I’m Indian. I guess our colors bleed close together.Â
Dumas is funny, no doubt. We’ve talked about humor being used as catalyst for more serious topics, which is exactly what Dumas seems to be doing. Sometimes, she just tells her stories and they are light and heart warming while being funny, but sometimes her stories carry some deeper undertone to them, where she seems to be making her most implied comments about life in America. It’s true that her books are just a collection of stories, but they are more than that. She uses her diction and other rhetorical skills to make the story much deeper and more significant than it seems on surface. I think that it really helps to pick up on these things because I can relate to her stories so well.Â
One thing I’ve noticed about her writing is that when she is saying something significant, she says it very bluntly. For a person unfamiliar with the culture she’s talking about, this kind of stuff is just thrown into your face so matter-of-factly that it adds an element to the story. I don’t quite have words to explain what I mean, but I’ll try. For example, on page 5, she explains the Iranian marriage traditions. She says about her mother, “...and that is how at age seventeen my mother officially gave up her dreams, married my father, and had a child by the end of the year.” She then immediately launches back into the story without a moments pause to let the readers digest anything. The bluntness is odd and even surprising, but it’s done on purpose, I believe, to stress the fact that that’s how matter of fact the whole affair really was, because that’s just how it works in Iran. Like people here eat breakfast, people there get married off. And realizing that fact for a reader is the implied statement that she makes. She’s drawing these sharp contrasts between her home culture and America’s, because her audience is primarily Americans, I believe. She definitely has a very interesting writing style that helps to make her case and makes her book even more interesting.
