Immigrant Experience as an Oedipal War of Words in Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects

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.