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.
Symbols & Motifs
Cuisine
Food has a central role in the memoir, and it usually provides Dumas with a means to compare and contrast Iranian and American cultures. The chapter “America, Land of the Free” is replete with discussions of food, specifically how Dumas’s family incorporates traditional Iranian dishes into the celebration of American Thanksgiving. Dumas also discusses her father’s penchant for trips to Denny’s and how the restaurant chain, for him, symbolizes cleanliness. When Dumas reflects on Christmas and her tradition as an adult of baking cookies for her children, she draws associations between Christmas and the Iranian holiday of Nowruz, even though these are vastly different celebrations. The act of baking and preparing the food for holiday celebrations elicits a wistful recollection of her youth.
Easy Money
There are two episodes in which this motif is most prevalent. The first is the scene in which Kazem becomes a contestant of Bowling for Dollars. The second is the chapter in which Dumas describes her father’s favorite vacation destination, Las Vegas. In each case, Kazem has visions of striking it rich, essentially by luck. His visions do not involve nefarious scheming; instead, they are akin to playing the lottery and dreaming of what to do with the winnings. In both cases, Kazem becomes convinced of his own natural luck to such an extent that it blinds him to the reality that these kinds of get-rich-quick dreams are built on a house of cards. In the case of winning in Las Vegas, he fails to understand that the odds are quite long that he will win, and they remain long, no matter how many times he takes his holiday there. Both episodes also highlight Kazem’s tendency to be blindsided by his own optimism and idealism.
Exoticism
Early in the memoir, after Firoozeh and her mother become lost, and an American woman invites them into her home, Dumas likens her and her mother’s appearance to the circus. The suggestion here is not that they are viewed as animals or treated poorly; rather, they are strangely out of place due to how different they are. They are exotic in that they represent something foreign to Americans. Likewise, Firoozeh discovers early that her name sounds “exotic” to American ears. Although she is the “exotic other” in the US, while she was in Iran as a child, she perceived America itself as an exotic place, one that was embellished by the stories her father told. She also objects to her husband's request to honeymoon in India because she feels no desire to experience “exotic forms of discomfort” (60); having lived with outdoor toilets and other challenges that Western tourists at times romanticize or exoticize, she persuades her fiancé to honeymoon in Paris.
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