In her novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove Atlantic, 2008), Porochista Khakpour makes an extraordinary experiment of pitting words against words, sometimes one as an unexpected or outrageous modifier to another, sometimes as a surprising doubling or mirroring, and sometimes as an unexpected break in the customary chain of signification, an utter negation or violent defamiliarization of the connotation and denotation of words. This technique—of yoking incompatible binaries, objective correlatives, reversals, and inversions—leads to deconstructing the immigrant experience to express outrage and invoke trauma rather than inspire empathy and identification. Words that do not match their peers or adhere to linguistic rules and expectations are the driving trope for the discordance of the immigrant experience in this novel. Meta-textually, Khakpour’s craft works to encapsulate the immigrant story as one of real-world hardships that mutate everyday language and hobble language itself, making words macabre or disjointed in ways equivalent to weapons of war and deeply troubling the story of the American Dream for immigrants.
Of course, language is at the heart of the matter of cultural translations and violations, as Edward Said and others have reminded us. Though the protagonist Xerxes Adam’s Iranian immigrant family speaks English, it is an imposed and unloved foreign tongue. Khakpour’s techniques intentionally signal the speakers’ intrinsic cultural exile and alienation. This is the reason the family’s father, Darius Adam, goes out of his way “botching his near-perfect English to make a point…as if to say, Who cares about the bastard tongue?” The first instance of embattling (English) words is in the heading of part one of the novel: “The Birds and the Birds.” Here, doubling or mirroring functions to defamiliarize language and customary linguistic connotations, the phrase not ending in the typical formation “and the Bees.” Later in the novel, we will learn what birds have to do with the history of this Iranian immigrant family—and father Darius Adam’s trauma as a young man in post-revolutionary Iran—and with the title denoting sons among the flammable objects.
This novel is dominated by Oedipal concerns, making the word “Bastard” multifaceted, as it is also flagged by this early theme of botching and delegitimizing English, the imposed language of authority, not the “mother tongue.” The contrarian absolutism of Darius is described thus: “refraining from words-that-are-not-nice-ones—unless you were Darius Adam, that is—had become a family rule in their house of swallowed discontentment, of several future decades’ worth of ulcers” (emphasis mine). The idea of discontent becomes alimentary again, breaking up habitual language to create a new signified, a new lexicon of meanings: repression as toxic, family as toxic.
The home itself is set in a war zone of sorts as the vocabulary betokens, describing their “residence among the palms and oaks of their conflicted suburban California neighborhood, in particular their apartment complex, ‘Eden Gardens’…” The setting is anything but Edenic, and it befits conflicted and manipulated language to say this more eloquently than pages of description. So, it is also befitting that the angry cat-owner who shows up at the Adams’ door to give Darius a piece of her mind about belling the cats to save the neighborhood birds uses language as a classic linguistic imperialistic weapon against “immigrants,” “suddenly speaking more slowly, perhaps picking up that they were foreign.”
Linking demographic conflict with Oedipal themes of troubled lineage, the neighbors are a motley crew. There is the “Jesus-looking man” that Darius Adam and his wife call “The Drug-Dealer”; someone only known as the “Silent-Arts-and-Crafts-Lady”; the ominously categorized “The Mexicans”; the “Weird Old Chinese Man”; and “The Sorority Girls.” And the cats—who are central characters here—from whom Darius Adam fights to protect the complex’s blue jays to the great annoyance of cat-owners, are “the staple pet” for “everyone who didn’t have something more exciting, more far-fetched, something more California-crazy.” It’s a ragtag, lumpenproletarian world, pretty much, except for the Adam family who had…nothing.
In all this, the cats are Darius’s greatest adversaries, because he finds them racist. He bells the neighbors’ cats, “who all killed…but one is all it takes to spoil the bunch—like racism, the whole race suffers when one raceman wrongs” (sic), to combat their extermination of the blue jays.
Another discordant objective correlative is found in Xerxes Adam’s material world. His mother uses the same kinds of “baggies” and “plastic spoons” for his school lunch as the ones his father uses for scooping up and “burying” dead blue jays, making Xerxes reject lunch—which, moreover, happens to be traditional Iranian food— by throwing it away and buying cold pizza and coke in the cafeteria with money he’s stolen from the family laundry fund. He at least won’t eat his father’s traditional food, packed in what’s used to shroud dead birds, and with spoons used to dig graves for them, though he may be forced to swallow discontent in his father’s apartment. Rejecting the objects that correlate to his father’s maniacal symbolic grieving for Iran and the past is Xerxes’s only way of protesting Darius reauthoring what words and objects connote and denote.
Fighting words continue to pile up the dead of cross-cultural and interpersonal conflict. Darius’s unsettling muttering of “anti-prayer” at the “anti-sacrifice” of dead blue jays at the dumpster makes Xerxes flee from such scenes, while the cats continue their “clamor against clamor as if their consciences were dialoguing,” as readers also recoil from the conjuncture of sacred words with the negation. When an angry neighbor finally uses the “effin word,” it assaults the young Xerxes, who is trying to be “deaf, dumb, brain-dead, plastic” in the living room, “in all its verboten glory, like a defecating bogeyman.” The shocking negation of language in the profane crevices of everyday speech (but started, of course, by Darius’s “anti-prayer” and “anti-sacrifice”) has come full circle.
The conflict at home between his parents also infects, invades, and estranges language at a primal level for Xerxes. When his mother and father fight, his father retaliates by “strangling an innocent stick of butter,” while Xerxes has to apply the “social Band-Aid” of “cough! maybe even cough! cough!”
By the novel’s fourteenth page, one finds a piece de resistance of linguistic trickery, assault, and deceit. Darius simply lies to the angry neighbor: “I did not do whatever you’re talking about and also I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A lie is language at war with its meaning. But war is more surely at the doorstep. Darius Adam, “named after a mostly unconquerable Persian king” (again, the insecurity and frailty of the historical and linguistic record in that “mostly”) is “ready to decapitate this woman.”
Negation, defamiliarization, and inversions of truth, language as a collective consensus or contract, and the unexpected adherence of words to conventional denotations and connotations, is what makes Khakpour’s craft gripping from the beginning. Indeed, negation is a pattern of language in the family, as we see when Darius lies, utterly negating the role of language which is, ideally, to communicate, to link people with information. The immigrant father fighting against the uncanniness of his “conflicted California suburb” is the “mostly unconquered” king of subterfuge, decoy, and—as needed—strategic negation of truth. As an adult, Xerxes will refer to his father as a child who, like other children, loves that “negation crap” with whom it is always “Opposite Day…black-to-white contrarianism” or “poker faces over untruths” and whose language largely consists of “neither an acknowledgment nor a negation.”
With these bold strokes of estranging, mismatching, and even decapitating ordinary language and words, Porochista Khakpour achieves a superb effect of delineating the immigrant experience, of which so many trials, triumphs, and tests depend on the prevarications of language—internal, intimate, and public; in translation, transition, and transit.
