At the outset of The Pearl of Dari, Zuzanna Olszewska states that the title itself contains the three interlocking layers of significance that unfold throughout her book on “poetry and personhood among young Afghans in Iran.” Dorr-e Dari is the title of the Afghan émigré cultural institute in Mashhad, the main scope of Olszewska’s fieldwork—Dari being the main dialect of Persian spoken by many in Afghanistan and Dorr being its precious gem, a Persianate literature. Furthermore, as an excerpt from a poem by Naser Khosrow, the eleventh-century poet and traveler, “the pearl of Dari” harks back to a cosmopolitan era when Persianate societies were not divided by national borders, a time when “Afghans” and “Iranians” would be sharing—rather than contesting—Naser Khosrow’s intellectual heritage. Finally, the image of the “pearl” embedded in the title highlights the struggle “between outside appearance and inner truths” (p. xi), which is to Olszewska definitive of Afghan refugees’ self-determination, as a disenfranchised minority, in present-day Iran.

Whereas most studies of diasporic literatures tend to focus on the displacement of exilic authors from the so-called “periphery” to the Euro-American “core,” The Pearl of Dari takes a regional route and offers an ethnography of Afghan refugee lives and poetic output within the field of cultural production in contemporary Iran. The Introduction poignantly sets the tone for the writing of Afghan lived and felt experiences into a transnational history of modern Iran, as Olszewska recounts her visit in 2005 to a poor neighborhood in Mashhad to attend her first session of Dorr-e Dari, depicting the precarious lives of Afghan refugees as migrant laborers of second-class status. Yet against the backdrop of such dilapidated ghettoes on the margins of “Iran’s postrevolutionary urban expansion” (p. 1), some Afghan refugees have found in writing poetry a mode of self-expression and negotiation of collective identity.

After the first poetry recital—a poem titled “Mona Lisa” by Rahimeh Mirzaʾi: a critique of gender relations in her community—Olszewska begins her reflections on a diasporic culture that articulates its social and historical predicaments in a worldly, transnational, yet distinctly Perso-Afghan manner. The Pearl of Dari is thus introduced as “an ethnography of poetry” and “of how it is used to formulate, express, and consolidate certain kinds of persons and ideas of personhood in a migrant population” (p. 6). The three layers of Olszewska’s analysis are (1) to offer “an ethnographic portrait of urban-based Afghan refugees in the Islamic Republic of Iran and their subject formation through biopolitical and bureaucratic management”; (2) to examine “the cultural politics of this population” by way of studying “the history of organizations such as Dorr-e Dari and literary production in the context of political and social change”; and finally (3) to reach a “fine-grained description of how young Afghan refugees use the composition, performance, and circulation of a verbal art form pragmatically” to survive as well as to succeed within and beyond the host society (p. 6).

As a cultural ethnographer, Olszewska’s preliminary contribution is what she identifies as an “anthropology on the margins of the state” in order to comprehend not simply the disenfranchised but also the intricacies of the oppressive state apparatus. The Pearl of Dari is, therefore, a sustained critique of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s immigration laws and of Iranian society’s own xenophobia, that is made possible through a close reading of the exilic cultures at its periphery. Such is the transnational approach to a national problematic that should, in my view, be of central concern to this book’s Iranian audience.

Olszewska’s primary contribution arises from this transnational outlook, for as she sheds light on the lives and writings of the affiliates of Dorr-e Dari, she also restores a sense of regional worldliness that has been wiped out along the postcolonial borders of Iran and Afghanistan. Since poetry was before the advent of modernity integral to Persianate cultures, Olszewska’s examination of the literature produced by Afghan refugees in Iran—a nation-state where “Persian” cultural products are normatively labeled as “Iranian”—poses a corrective to the parochial historiography of Persian literature. The Afghan refugee poets of Dorr-e Dari are, in other words, not so much Out of Place, as Edward Said viewed his Palestinian-American hybridity, but they reclaim their roots in “the singular ‘public and shared ground’ of the Persian poetic heritage” that predates the postcolonial map of the Middle East (p. 11).

The Pearl of Dari consists of six chapters, closing with a Conclusion, and an Epilogue that revisits the research participants ten years into Olszewska’s fieldwork. Following the prelims and the theoretically dense Introduction, the first chapter, “Border Crossings and Fractured Selves,” is a history of the Afghan presence in Iran in light of the recent migration of Afghan labor to Iran in the long aftermath of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1978. As opposed to the organic flow of populations in the pre-modern history of the Persianate world, the contemporary flow of migrants has been fraught with modern legal terminologies, biopolitical management, and systematic disenfranchisement that are endemic to Afghan refugee experiences in Iran. While they were for a brief period after the Islamic Revolution viewed as fellow Muslims defying the Soviets, the displaced Afghans are today treated as foreign intruders exploiting the welfare state. Indeed, as Olszewska documents in unprecedented detail the precarious lives of Afghan refugees in contemporary Iran, I wonder why she ultimately stops short of labeling the state’s immigration policies as structurally racist.

Nevertheless, Olszewska extends her commentary on Iranian ethnocentrism to a critique of modern Persian literary studies as a flawed discipline that has centralized “Iranian” literature at the expense of “Other” Persianate cultures. While she rightly provides an inclusive account of such Afghanistan-based patrons and poets of the Silk Roads as Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and Abd ul-Rahman Jami, it is the contemporary poets of Dorr-e Dari, chief among them Mohammad Kazem Kazemi, who most effectively subvert the stigmatization of Afghan refugees in present-day Iran, calling instead for solidarity on shared linguistic grounds. Consequently, the second chapter, “The Melancholy Modern,” outlines the emergence of key intellectual trends among Afghan refugees that have resulted in a liminal, contradictory, yet transformative “structure of feeling.” The argument is that while the Afghan exilic intellectual has been positively informed by varied aspects of Iranian modernity, from the liberation theology of the Islamic Republic to the struggle for women’s rights within the civil society, s/he has also suffered from its politics of exclusion, be it the oppressive practice of political Islam or the broader society’s ironic xenophobia toward its Persian-speaking neighbors. The outcome, manifest in the poetry of Seyyed Abu Taleb Mozaffari and Gholamreza Ebrahimi, among others, is a far less ideological view of the world that echoes “the contradictory life of the exiled intellectual” (p. 91).

The third chapter, “Afghan Literary Organizations in Postrevolutionary Iran,” discusses the above transformations in institutional terms. As she provides a history of émigré literary formations in Iran, Olszewska argues that participation in the national field of literary production is one of the few means of acquiring cultural capital whereby some Afghan refugees have improved their situations. Depending on the shifting roles patronage and ideology have played since the Islamic Revolution, Afghan literary organizations and their poetic output have undergone two major transformations: the political, or “Committed,” poetry of the 1980s (along the lines of state-sponsored engagé writing) and the more subjective, or “postmodern,” poetry of the 2000s (transgressing state ideology through introspection and social consciousness). The foundation of Dorr-e Dari along with its official publication Khatt-e Sevvom/Third Script in 2002 were the outcome of such paradigm shift from a collective to an individual “I” in poetic expression, in order to engage in “specialist cultural work” (p. 108), often in “opposition to many of the social and aesthetic values of Committed poetry” (p. 119).

The remainder of The Pearl of Dari is a closer reading of Afghan lived experiences through their poetic engagements. The fourth chapter, “The Social Lives of Poets and Poetry,” opens with a historical perspective on the formation and function of literary circles in the Persianate world in order to contextualize the Dorr-e Dari institute as a cultural event as well as a social function. Although a minor problem with this chapter might be its rather descriptive account of the mundane at the expense of much-needed theoretical nuance, Olszewska’s ethnography demonstrates that Afghan literary circles in Iran are an effective means toward a multifaceted personhood and agential performance of subjectivity in exile. The fifth chapter, “Modern Love,” is by far the most intimate and gendered look into Afghan refugee lives, focusing on the changing conceptions of femininities and masculinities in marriage. What is interesting about the representation of “love” in contemporary Persian literature is that unlike its erotic and metaphysical manifestations in pre-modern periods, “love” is now enmeshed in marriage as a social institution and means of reproduction. Against this backdrop, a new generation of Afghan refugee poets are advocating change, viewing love through the prism of companionate marriage, and writing poetry as a mode of self-refashioning in the host as well as their own diasporic communities.

Yet I find it problematic that in her study of companionate marriage in Perso-Afghan literature, Olszewska views “Iranian modernity” as the sole proxy through which Afghan refugees have encountered “modern” conceptions of love—as if Afghanistan would not have undergone any sexual revolution had some of its population not been displaced to Iran. If anything, Olszewska herself provides provocative examples from Perso-Afghan folk tradition in which women poets have expressed sexual agency and autonomy (p. 161). I therefore wonder how a more in-depth exploration of the encounter with Anglo-European modernity in nineteenth-century Afghanistan could contribute to Afghan refugees’ changing perceptions of love and intimacy in exile, and diasporic literature, in twentieth and twenty-first century Iran.

Finally, the sixth chapter includes Olszewska’s most ambitious attempt at a poetics of Afghan refugee poetry in contemporary Iran. Focusing on self-expression in lyric poetry in light of the “inner” and “external” duality of personhood in Persianate social and cultural history, she argues that the affiliates of Dorr-e Dari have been negotiating new modes of personhood in search of a balance between the “public” capital of life as a refugee intellectual and the “private” virtues of life in a conservative society. Olszewska, of course, is conscious and critical of the orientalist bifurcation of Persianate culture between domestic and public lives, but she insists on the generation gap that has rendered the Afghan émigré youth more extroverted, outspoken, and willing to self-actualize. As the dialectic between the inner and outer lives of the artist plays out, it is female poets and women’s poetry that most intrigues Olszewska. Thus, she closes her book by reading two poems, one by Maral Taheri on the theme of sexual domination and another by Zahra Hosseinzadeh (whose portrait is featured on the book’s jacket), on the theme of depression and mental health issues as struggling refugees in Iran. Ultimately, the two women vividly articulate the recasting of the “shell” that at once conceals and reveals the “pearl” of Dari in Afghan refugee poetry.

As Olszewska perceives the “ambivalent disposition” of the Afghan refugee poet as one that is “neither fully Afghan nor Iranian,” but which feels “whole again” by virtue of the cultural heritage shared by modern-day Afghans and Iranians alike (p. 31), the reader is also given the chance to rethink Iranian Studies. If indeed our field has traditionally taken on the body politic within confines of national borders, The Pearl of Dari examines the poetic output of an exilic culture that has been transformed along the porous borders of Iran and Afghanistan, nurturing creative refugee poets who are simultaneously informed by the historical vicissitudes of their homeland as well as the host society—from the endless foreign interventions back home in Afghanistan to the ongoing quest for democracy in Iran, and the continued struggle for class, ethnic, and gender justice in both countries.