Litany

Dear Nazy:

Good luck in your quest to figure me out.  If and when you do, please drop me a line.  :)

I am tormented by the plight of my ancient land and my inability to make things better.  Perhaps I am a mother first and foremost.  The rest is a jumbled mess of confusion, and that tangled web of characters comes across in my writings.

Merci

Dear Laleh:

I am not one to dispense advice, not too much, anyway. Compliments and encouragements, maybe, but who died and made me the wise one to know what to do under emergencies and circumstances of dire personal conflict?

I read a lot of what people write because that is my interest, reading, and sometimes writing. I have read your pieces with interest and concern. When you say "It is my style not to get involved while the readers duke it out," I assume you are an experienced writer/blogger who has written frequently enough to have developed a "style." Certainly, under this user ID and the blogs you have posted in one week thus far, if you are indeed a brand new writer, speaking of your "style" with such conviction seems a bit overt. One has to blog a lot and for an extended period of time before such "style" is achieved and three blogs hardly lend themselves to such requirement.

I appreciate your writing style and your courage in expressing yourself. It is a very promising beginning, again, under this ID and on this forum. Though I try to write and less than half the time I manage to produce something, I have such a long way to go myself to becoming the writer that I aspire to be. Even so, sometimes I get so disappointed by the caliber of writing some bloggers produce. Poor English, sloppy writing full of typing errors which could have easily been identified and corrected with MS Word's spellchecker, and undeveloped thoughts are only some of what ails some of the writing on the site. When a new writer starts writing with bold and beautiful language, it is always refreshing to read and to learn. Yours has certainly had a very good start with me in that area, and I should have written earlier to thank you for that pleasure.

The content of what you have written, however, has been a bit confusing and disconcerting to me. If you actually have a plan for developing your stories, I can see that creating circumstances where people's attention is grabbed and they are kept interested to follow what's to come can be a very effective entrance. In that case, whether people are outraged or are moved into advice-dispensing mode or are mobilized into a supportive stance, can be all good. Nothing is more rewarding for a writer to receive such diverse kinds of reactions among his/her readers.

The problem I am starting to develop with your writing, however, is of a different texture. As a reader, I like to know what kind of material I am reading. Is it a memoir? Is it a personal story? Is it fiction? Where it may have appeared that your first blog was a story, in the second and third installments you have made it clear that this is the story of your life. The reader then has to deal with the confusion of who this writer is? Is she an abused woman? Is she in a relationship with a man who would dish out the worst kind of insensitive, racist insults to his wife, the mother of his child, in the most unfair and unwarranted fashion and time? How has that relationship lasted and flourished in the years to come? Or has it at all?

Your last blog has in fact been the most confusing one of all. Whereas at the end of the first story you were a woman insulted and mistreated, in your second blog you became a proud woman who wouldn't take any abuse from anyone, and by the end of your third blog you became a brand new character, a cross between a woman who has been rejected in love (the title of your blog from William Congreve's play), Joan of Arc, and Lorena Babette! Are we to wait and see exactly how you sought revenge on all those insults and that darkness, delivering yourself into a space in your life where, living with the same man and in the same marriage, you are now carrying the flag of emancipation and freedom for all women? There need to be a lot of convincing words written to tide the woman in your stories from one post to another.

I think you need to write more and we need to keep on reading to better understand you. You will not see me dispensing any advice to you, because it appears that you are ready to dispense some advice yourself! I will keep on reading your bold writing and reserve further reaction until I have understood you a bit more.

Best of luck with your writing experiments here. You have come to the right place for doing this. I have been at it for a few years now and I have only grown richer for the experience and the pleasure of user interaction from a diverse and unique audience I could only find on Iranian.com--other Iranians.

Laleh, I read your blogs. I

Laleh,
I read your blogs. I also really enjoyed them. I enjoyed them mostly because it hit a very personal and familiar nerve. Not with my husband, no he's a saint. But with others.
My point is Iranians are prone to "nasihat". We can't help ourselves. We can't read anything and take it as a journal, a blog, thoughts to be jotted. We feel that a situation needs to be remedied and we Iranians omniknowing need to remedy it.
I think you should continue to write. It was very thought provoking. I wanted to chime in but felt intimidated by all the feedback. I think the point was missed entirely. Then again I could be wrong. Lord knows on this site those who love to nasihat will be the first to tell me.

Well what now?

With three blogs, one of them in Farsi, it was impossible to say what kind of style you have, and from what you said in this blog you wanted ‘not to get involved while the readers duke it out’. But that‘s BS. I think you deliberately did what you did to provoke reactions.

Well what now? You live in North America and you advocate violence against once your country people and you write propaganda and slogans. Let’s see what you write next. It better not be slogans or propaganda or I am out of here.

Good Luck,