I cannot say anything straight about Iran. I use small words, simple, but the ideas come out twisted up, like a pair of French pantyhose the women wear to mehmoonis, then pull off in relief as the night ends; unzip the dress, discard the hose, unpin the hair and with it the twined smell of cigarette smoke, cardamom, Christian Dior’s Poison.
When I was 25 I wanted to write about grass, skinny moons, American boys—the only ones I’d ever fucked—but they want me to write about Iran. Write about Iran! they said. Some would even go the extra mile to let me know it was my ticket in: you want to be a novelist? There, just write about Iran and you’re done. As if it was the simplest, rather than the most confusing of undertakings. As if my back pocket, or my palm, or my clear-sighted memory contained a self, ordered and understood, one that neatly coalesced around the word Iran.
When I speak to my parents, I use the wrong syntax and I wonder how many Persian kids born in America do this. I’m speaking English, my grammar is impeccable, I have no accent except the other way around (you sound Armani, my mom says to the din of my Farsi). But when I’m home in their house, I translate the words into a loose, imperfect order, the way my mother speaks in English, because I know she’ll pick up what I am saying faster:
I put it already there.
We will come later to you.
Yau want them how many?
As a young person when I was angry, I’d weaponize the syntax: arrange words in perfect, preening order, conjugating progressives and slinging past participles in an attempt to lose my mother and father. The more enraged I was, the more exact the articulation.
My English and how I wielded it—high and austere, or lax and kind—was an unfair assault but no moreso than it’s unfair when your home is not your home. My mom has lived in the States for 40 years, my dad for 60. They understand you; there’s no need to shout.
Still I wonder how many kids like me do a translation job to a different-gear syntax, as a matter of habit when they talk to their Iranian parents.
**
I went to Iran when I was 18 and it was beautiful, a country of scent and chatter, my face tucked in each face I passed, my Americanness bald and tangible. I wanted everything, romance, to swim in the Caspian Sea forever, to be like the girls on the streets cool and imperious, who never sweat under their manteaus, to start a revolution in a place not my own. But I was not them, grit or grace under pressure; I was not them in knowledge of the body.
I should have been born into hijab-wearing, egregious oppression, laws that hated me; the ghost me, the Iran-born me was. She knew what it was to cover her hair at age 8, not because her family believed in it, nor she herself, but because the decorum on the street, mercurial and ominous, demanded it. My ghost speaks elegant Farsi without an accent and her understanding of language is much broader, richer than mine; she sees complexity in the world because names are given to so many things, sometimes 4 or 5 names to one object or feeling. Nevertheless, my ghost’s wisdom of the world doesn’t bring her closer to freedom: she fights a system that doesn’t bother to acknowledge her except as its scapegoat. She has never kissed a boy and the first time she does her body pulses with fear as much as pleasure. She is kinder to her parents, I think, than I am.
I was born in California, into softness and tumbling sunshine, dug up and transplanted amongst
the redwoods and ferns. The anger for my ghost self has always been with me—I’m mad for the
girl I didn’t even have to be. The stories come: Iranian girls and women torn asunder, hanged
from cranes, raped for being raped for being raped, innocence called every other name but that
which it is, the evilest of men cloaked in clergy clothes so they might tear into the bodies of little
girls, little children, whatever can be devoured. These stories were piped into the house like
water to the taps, if not directly by my parents then by the émigré families with whom we kept
company, where a murky shared history allowed us conversation and communion.
When I first heard about Iran’s girls I was so young there was no word for the rage that burned in my throat; feminism wasn’t in fashion and it wasn’t in my 6-year-old vocabulary. Now that I am grown, the crimes are done to girls younger than me. Mahsa and Neda are a girlhood I knew-but-didn’t-know, a weight in my ear, a threat dropped, an inequity carved into my center, declaring itself. Yet outside the window of my childhood there is only a rose bush, the bluejay squawking, my red bicycle I’ve left on its side in a patch of warm grass.
Write about her, they tell me sensibly. The ghost Mitra. But what would I say? That the wrong done to her, to the girl I could feel but wasn’t, slipped under my skin like a cold knife? That it drove me to narrative, to wanting to set a record, to glaring at American men who called me a firecracker, as if a girl who spoke aloud was explosive.
Write about Iran. But I wanted to be like Walt Whitman: free. Unburdened from my cultural weights, from any syntax or punctuation. I just wanted to write about grass.
**
I am 40 now. I have a daughter with an American father and my parents, my lifeline to the past, are aging. It is all I can do in a day but help running after a history I do not know, taking my daughter anywhere to hear snippets of Farsi, going to Persian restaurants to eat our food. Late at night I watch comedies with Iranian actors, preferring these because the chapters are gone in my life when my mother would construct the world and with it, Iran; in her accent, with her way of being and loving and making war or laughter, showing me day after day after day, the broken fragments of who we are and what I am.
Now the choice is to let it fade and with it, a history, a legacy, a childhood, a little girl, and a ghost; or to go in search of a land and people I didn’t know and never fully will; a place to which I both belong and do not, to pass on to my daughter a half-way way of speaking.
I surprise myself! Today, at least, I am stooping to pick up the pieces, clenching them in tight fists even as they slice blood into my palm. I won’t let them go.
Mitra Parineh writes Pleasure and Other Worries, a weekly letter on beauty, food, sex, art, and other people, for literary readers. She is the writer and director of the play Power’s Out, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post, 7×7, and Hyperallergic. She was the voice of Iran for We the Women, an arts collective in Los Angeles, where her words were shared by thousands of readers. She has an essay forthcoming in Frenshe, and is at work on a novel and a collection of prose poems called Birthday Letters.
