A Brief Comment About Camel Jockey Go Home

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Nothing in this era of globalization says “problematic of multiculturalism” like the imperative “go home.”  I cannot recall another Iranian or Iranian-American writer who weaves fun, fear, achievement, anger, assimilation and community together so well and with such keen insight into the multiple levels of the human condition, as does Jahanbin in Camel Jockey Go Home.

Ironically, the aesthetic grace of Camel Jockey Go Home does not betray it’s more serious achievement as a timely record of “embodiment”; the role of “others” in the United States.  Indeed, psychologists, social psychologist and race-relation sociologists will take something rare and important from this melodramatic tale of the contemporary Iranian-American experience.

The humiliation of the immigrant experience in America has many flavors for which there is no rehearsal.  For Jahanbin, “Iranian individualism” and chivalry are subordinated and ultimately reborn in the metaphor “America, the Land of Immigrants.”  Informed by his experience, Jahanbin becomes an irrefutably hard working teacher devoted, not only to the education of those whose sole nourishment is the optimism of America’s promise, but also their healing and preparation for the very long journey ahead.

The little brown boy as Jahanbin’s enigmatic “inner child,” emerges as a mixed racial epithet of structural ethnicity that wins a permanent dialogue from within between rationality and irrationality, fear and decision.

Jahanbin, in Persian language, means the one who has the Crystal Ball, an experienced Hakim, a wise man who knows what the rest of us take for granted.  It is unsurprising that he unveils what we as readers need to grasp in this honest, insightful work of reality and sociological imagination.

- Dr. Hasan Shahpari, PhD
Professor Sociology, Villanova University