The Bluest Eye & Lipstick Jihad

The Bluest Eye and Lipstick Jihad both featured characters whose outward appearances affected the inward of understanding themselves. Their situations were complicated in terms of the ways individuals are contextualized in particular historical, cultural, and geographical situations because Pecola Breedlove (The Bluest Eye) and Azadeh Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad) both came to realize that finding their identities did not have the turnout in the end as they had imagined.

In the Bluest Eye, Pecola felt that she was ugly because that was what people told her. Praying for the blue eyes of all the blond, blue-eyed girls in America, she thought they would make her pretty afterall. She imagined that if she had blue eyes, "the bluest eyes" as she thought, people would be jealous of her because of her gift. Fantasizing about the one asset that she saw everyone fascinate about, she thought, would make her feel more of an acceptance to her community and its people. Because blue-eyed girls, and baby dolls given to her as gifts, were looked upon as the 'idea of beautiful,' Pecola wishes for blue eyes, in hope that she will become beautiful. In the end, she fantasizes that her wish has been granted and she finally has her blue eyes, but no one pays her much attention, which she thinks is because of their jealousy for her blue eyes.

In Lipstick Jihad, Azadeh Moaveni was struggling to find her identity as an Iranian growing up in American. After college, she decides to move back to her homeland, Tehran, and try to figure out if she can still consider herself a citizen there although she moved away years ago. Her journey through Tehran was what she was least expecting it to be. Her expectations of the country were far more different than what she was used to in California. Her time spent in Tehran, she witnessed the restrictions placed on men and women-where women were not allowed to associate or be seen in public with the opposite sex and required to have all parts of their bodies covered at all times except their faces, which they beautified with the popularity of cosmetic surgery, and later where they were not allowed to smoke. No finding at all as to her reason being there, Azadeh came to realize that Tehran "defied being known; its mood changed mercurially by the day, the scope of its horizon seemed to expand and shrink by the season, and even its past was a contested battle" (p.245) After realizing this was not where she belonged, Azadeh returned to Calafornia and came to the conclusion that her identity-experincing journey left her " all displaced and Iran-disfigured" (p.246).