ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Persian language as a site of construction, dismantling, and reconstruction of Iranian identity. Despite radical differences in the operative concept of Iranianness in the two historical and cultural moments that serve as the background of Modarressi and Esfandiary's novels, there remains a fundamental drive for purity and wholeness of the national sense of belonging. Modarressi's relationship to English was marked by a different level of impenetrability. Whether he wrote in Persian or translated his own writing into English, he remained an outsider and occasionally had to pause and wonder what the word was for a hen's husband. Communicating these levels of deterritorialization to the readers of his novels, be it in Persian or in English, Modarressi invites us to ponder an experience that invoked in the verses by Mowlana Jalal al-din Rumi recalled in The Pilgrim's Rules of Etiquette.
