Members-only Blog :: Association of Iranian American Writers

I am a Tehran girl. I was born in Tehran’s Amirieh neighborhood, but moved to Tehran Pars with my family before I turned one. The quiet and sleepy suburban neighborhood had all that was ideal about raising children, I guess. The perfect new streets, all straight and numbered, were signs that this was one of the first planned neighborhoods of Tehran. It had amenities no other neighborhood had as yet, a huge playground, a modern public swimming pool, a drive-in cinema, two adjacent elementary schools for girls and boys, and even aspirations for a casino!

Our house was near a stone cutting factory, sang-bori. Everyday at noon, just before hearing the azaan from the mosque nearby, we could hear a siren which announced lunch break for the workers. The paved road leading to our house ended right after our house and the rest was nothing but vast fields, covered in untouched snow during winter months, and covered with wild daisies and brambles during the rest of the year. It feels surreal now to remember that we used to see herds of sheep and camels in our neighborhood all the time. They would come around to graze and rest, from where to where, I do not know. I only know that in the quiet neighborhood, you could never miss the sound of the bells around the camels’ necks, heralding their arrival, creating a frenzy among the children who would run out to stand watch all around the camel herd. I remember my mother offering the man cold water and food sometimes. I also remember riding on the camels occasionally, when the shotorban would let me. I remember the mixed exhilaration and fear of being raised several meters into the air and watching my sisters and my playmates from that height. I remember the nervous and gleeful laughter of us all.

Tehran felt big even when it was a lot smaller, but as I grew up and learned to move about independently, it became less intimidating to navigate. I knew it well in my neighborhood and places I had to go by myself, and slowly, I started to learn it well in other areas, understanding its dimensions and borders, and even something about how to survive in it. I learnt, for example, as a young woman, how to walk straight and alert, with clothing that was not too suggestive, through certain parts of the city in order to make safe passage from men who took liberties with women’s breasts and buttocks in broad day light. I learned to have a sense of humor about their lewd words, matalak, uttered at me and all the other women going by. I learned the bus system, the way catching a taxi worked, and how and where to sit in a taxi cab to avoid the leg of the man to my right or the elbow of the cab driver, eagerly pushing into my left breast and petting my left thigh during each gear shift.

Tehran was my beautiful ugly city, sprawling at the bottom of so many mountains surrounding it, providing nonstop entertainment and fascination to anyone who wanted to know it. I lived side by side of many who had been attracted to it from far away places of the world, living it and loving it. Did Tehran have cemeteries, too? Did it have prisons and torture chambers, too? I didn’t know. The question never occurred to me.

Tehran was the city in which I fell in love for the first time, and all the other times after it. I cried my tears talking to the streams of water running through shallow canals, joob, from North to South, whispering my longings to the trees lining its Pahlavi Avenue. Those same streets saw my wedding motorcade one day, where our old Jian was decorated with flowers and ribbons, followed by friends and families’ better cars, escorting us to our honeymoon.

I was a real Tehran girl.

Leaving Tehran in 1978, the last image of looking back and taking in Mehrabad Airport has remained fresh and at times surreal in my mind. This was an image I had to come back to many, many times, asking myself in desperation whether it was the same city I saw in flames and chaos just a few months later on ABC News. I had left what I had thought was my peaceful and safe city, full of happy friends and family, only to see people who resembled them walking down the same streets of memory and love, chanting slogans of protest, getting beaten up and shot at, with a familiar looking boys’ bloody hand pointed at the camera. In the months to come, I could recognize less and less of the city in the images and even less of the people in it.

I returned to Iran in April, 1980. I managed to catch the last glimpses of the urban utopia Tehran had become to so many people who had become revolutionaries. I remember walking on Shahreza, Enghelab Avenue, across from Tehran University, watching the never-ending rows of books and tapes and newspapers offered by educated, green jacket clad peddlers, feeling inadequate in my ignorance about the left and about Islam. The utopian state didn’t last, for soon I also had to witness the violent crackdown on newspaper girls and the book peddlers. My mind was locked in a perpetual state of fear with news of relatives captured, some executed for being generals in Shah’s army, or for distributing flyers at a rally, the difference never understood.

I remember the day Iraqi missiles hit Mehrabad Airport. I was at work and the distant sound of a blast did little to convey the significance of what was about to come to my inexperienced mind. Witnessing the ensuing curfew and watching pickup trucks carrying gun wielding young men headed for the war front needed months to register and settle in my mind and to convey the reality of what was up ahead, a war. I remember having to learn to stand in lines for fuel, for bread, and for tissue paper and milk. I had to learn to get used to hearing gun shots, too. One day we were having tea on the terrace and the sound of three gun shuts close by had all of us frozen. Some government official had been assassinated steps away in broad daylight.

I left Iran again in 1981, unable to return until 1988. During these years, family and friends had been imprisoned, executed, or forced to flea Iran. My heart was parked in a perpetual state of longing, sadness, and fear for Iran. During these years I finally knew Tehran had cemeteries and prisons.

I returned to Tehran in 1992. My city had changed. Its parks were fenced in, its streets were covered in huge murals, showing images of martyrs and religious leaders, its periphery had grown in reach and population, its air had started to become unbreathable, and its people had changed in appearance and demeanor, somehow seeming shorter, darker, and so much sadder. I remember staying inside the house for several weeks, unable to overcome the fear of facing people I felt I no longer knew. I remember feeling numb as I got dressed properly to leave the house, unable to enjoy any activity, feeling reserved and frightened all the time. What if I said the wrong thing? What if I did the wrong thing? I could get arrested and I wouldn’t know what to say and do to get out. I went to find my childhood home and found the neighborhood changed and deteriorated, ugly, and menacing. Nothing felt familiar, nothing. Where is my city, I wondered more than once.

Gradually, though, Tehran grew on me again. It was like it opened its arms, somehow, and let me in. I started to re-learn its streets and neighborhoods, its inadequate urban transportation system, and to push the scaly exterior aside and put my hand on its soft and velveteen heart. I fell in love with the ugly beauty all over again.

I tried, without much success, to save its last standing trees. I was a determined army of one, on a mission. I learned a lot about corruption and greed, but I was also able to give a few jolts of awareness and resistance to the men carrying the axes and pushing the green parrots and sparrows, gonjishks, out of Tehran forever.

My biggest accomplishment during this time, however, was the two new Tehranis in my family, my sons. Now they had to learn the city and fall head over heels in love with it. Now they had to learn the walk, the talk, and the tension and excitement that lived under the beautiful ugly’s skin. Now they had to learn its new rules, of illegal parties and illegal kisses and illegal longing. Now they had to learn to negotiate their way out of an arrest or how to spend a night in a detention center cell. They are Tehran Boys now.

I watched the June uprising on YouTube this time, trying to make sense of what was happening in Tehran, yet again. Only this time, I had the Tehran Boys nearby, sharing my shock and grief, feeling the excitement and pride, and helping me identify our neighborhoods through the smoke, crowds, rocks, and charging police bikers.

“Is that Vanak’s Shiraz Square?!!” Asked the Tehran Girl.

“Yes, I think I see the sign for “Bonab Kabab,” said one of the Tehran Boys.

This piece was written for an Association of Iranian American Writers’ reading at “One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran,” at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. Exhibition runs through January 23, 2009.

http://www.theintersection.org/calendar/index.php?op=view&id=1205

Manijeh here, new to blogging so maybe what I’ve written is too long for this format but I wanted to use this space to work out some thoughts inspired by Jasmin’s essay on the Critical Issues page, and maybe to get some discussion going.

Recently, the head of an arts organization, who knows I teach and write memoir, asked me if I didn’t think the genre was something of an unfortunate fad, little more than navel gazing, market-driven rather than real literature (by which she meant fiction and poetry). 

Like Jasmin, who was caught off guard by the question about Iranian women’s memoir, I too was unprepared to state my case for memoir as a lasting and worthy part of literature even though I’m confronted with this sentiment a lot, actually. I think Jasmin’s essay does an excellent job of shifting the debate around Iranian women’s writing from the polarized neo-con vs. anti-imperialist terrain to a measured discussion of the process by which ethnic literatures emerge within the United States.

Another thread of her argument concerns the issue of whose voices are permitted to be heard, of breaking the silences imposed historically on women and on working class, LGBTQ and mixed-race members of immigrant groups, which memoir has often made possible.

I don’t want to feel defensive when challenged about the literary value of memoir. Instead, I want to talk about what I love about this genre at its best (there are plenty of hack, sensationalist, badly written memoirs, just as there are novels, so part of this is an appeal not to throw the baby out with the bathwater).

What I love about memoir at its best is that it takes as its subject matter the exploration of memory, that shifting landscape that exists at the intersection of psychology and history. Unlike other analysts of human behavior or historical legacies, there is no pretense at objectivity in memoir, only the promise to speak the truth as the author has experienced it, hopefully with an awareness that this truth may be contested or remembered differently by others.

Because memoir covers events that actually happened to real people who actually experienced them, it can function as a democratizing force in the telling of history. You don’t need a formal education, let alone advanced degrees, to fill in the missing pieces of a collective understanding of the past. All you need is a good story, a large dose of integrity to guide your motives and the skills to render a compelling narrative.

For example, Jimmy Santiago Bacca was illiterate when he was sent to prison in his early twenties. He taught himself to read and write in jail and became a poet and a memoirist. His memoir, A Place to Stand, is beautifully written but also documents his fight to be a full human being under very oppressive conditions. To me, it matters that this was not presented as a fictional account, it matters that this Chicano man really survived what he did and managed to find the tools to articulate what happened to him as a way of showing what happened to his people. The details of his life lead directly to the larger history of racism and assimilation, but also to the universal struggle to not let the past define one’s future. I think here of Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” and how much I identified with this real man who actually had a father he both loved and hated, who sifted through the legacy of bitterness and rage his father passed on to find the causes of this inherited pain, as well as the memories of human connection that were also part of their relationship.

Especially for people of mixed heritage (in my case, Iranian/Zoroastrian and Eastern European Jewish/American), I think memoir can carry the uniqueness of our experiences and attest to the hidden histories of cultural and racial crossings that exist in every ethnic group. To me, it matters that our stories are not invented, that James McBride, for example, had a white, Jewish mother who tried to pass for black. This is a counter-narrative to the painful and more common phenomenon of blacks passing for white, and it would not carry the same historical, human or social weight if it was made up or presented as fiction.

I’m still trying to formulate my views about all of this as I work on my own memoir. But the same way that Jasmin encourages us not to let one set of debates overshadow an entire body of work, I am trying not to let the publishing industry’s promotion of badly written memoirs, or some writers’ self-serving motives, define the value of memoir.

I think of Chinua Achebe who said, “Don’t fence me in.” He was defending his decision, as a Nigerian, to write in English. I want to extend this sentiment to say let’s not fence in the genre of memoir or allow anyone else to either.

Memoir can take many forms, from hybrid and experimental texts like Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee to more conventional narratives like J.M Coetzee’s account in Boyhood of how white South African boys learned to become oppressors under the apartheid educational system. I don’t want this genre to be reduced in the eyes of readers or writers by the whims of profit-driven publishers, who sometimes rush out mediocre or even false memoirs. Rather, I hope the genre will be considered according to the same high standards for good storytelling that we want to see applied to fiction and that it will continue to enrich and challenge our understanding of history.

AIAW meeting at Katayoon Zandvakili's house last Fall

I went to another AIAW (Northern California group) meeting today. Once a month, we get together on a Sunday at a writer’s home, where we socialize over brunch before sitting down to discuss AIAW business and activities in the area.  Some of the writers then read their writings and poetry for the rest of us, while we provide feedback and offer ideas.

Of all the things I do these days, this is one of the most rewarding gatherings in which I attend. I have found so many good friends and such important and supportive friendships through the writers’ meetings. Whether they are accomplished and published authors, or startups such as myself, a warm feeling of friendship and belonging runs through the sessions with plenty of residue in the following weeks while we prepare for our next meeting. For the first time in my life, I have started taking writing very seriously, wanting to do better, having found new direction through my interactions with the more experienced and seasoned writers. Aside from the monthly brunch/reading meetings, we also get together to support one another through public readings and events.

After our gathering today which took place at Jasmin Daraznik’s house (a most gracious hostess in spite of her feeling under the weather), some of us went to a poetry reading by Arab poets at Oakland’s Diesel Books. I will write separately to talk about that later.

Wherever you are, if you try and reach out to other AIAW members and the larger writer community, I can promise you that you will benefit and grow from the friendship and comaraderie. I most certainly feel that way today.

Zoe - Norooz Table

Oceans away from the land that I love, my Americanized lifestyle helps me to bury the past so deep inside that I don’t even think about it. That is, until someone, or something triggers my memory and then it all comes back vividly, as if it were only yesterday.

One such moment came recently as I read something in a book, a simple description that threw me back into my younger days. The simple phrase, “The jingling of gold rimmed tea glasses,” instantly filled my mind with a hundred visions, and in the rush of memories, my eyes welled with tears. Maybe that’s why forty years into this American life, I continue to read Persian books. Maybe this is my only ticket back to a happy life that can never be again.

Amid the jingle of ‘estekans’, I see my father’s manservant, carrying a tray of tea. A tiny, aging man, my father’s hand-me-down suit is too big on Rajab, but he seems to wear it with a certain pride. He gives me a sly smile that reveals a gold front tooth and nods, as if to say, “Someday you’ll remember this, khanoom koochik!” I watch him balance the tray on the palm of one hand before disappearing down the mosaic hallway. The grandfather clock chimes only part of its tune, “ding-dong”; telling me it’s a quarter past some hour. The hallway now seems to be miles long.

There’s also the jingle of tea glasses in the living room, where I find my aunt, serving tea, cookies and lettuce to our neighbor. She invites me to sit by her, and as she moves the platter of Romaine lettuce closer and places a small bowl of syrup before me, my mouth waters at the prospect of the sweet-and-sour taste. Khaleh-joon and the neighbor are working on a sewing project; spreading tons of fabric around and Khaleh picks up her scissors, the handle padded with rags to ease the movements for her arthritic hand. I take a leaf from the center of the half-lettuce, fold it, and dip it so deep into the syrup that it drips on my chin before reaching my mouth. Khaleh-joon is busy measuring the fabric and soon the snip-snip of scissors accompanies the sound of chewing crisp lettuce.

The jingling of gold-rimmed glasses take me back to all the rowzeh I went to just because they served ice cream, rice pudding, or other such treats. I never learned to balance my chador properly even after my grandmother sewed a small tassel in its middle. Women took their shoes off and sat on the rug in a room with no furniture. They drank their tea cheerfully, smoked thin Homa cigarettes, and the sound of their chatter filled the room. There was a sudden hush as the mullah walked in, made a fist around his rosary and grabbed his long robe while walking to the single chair set specifically for him. He cleared his throat and first hummed a sad tune and then broke into Arabic before beginning his story. He always seemed to begin in the middle of a sad saga and I never understood what the full story was, but everyone else seemed to be moved by it because soon all those laughing, joyful ladies broke into uncontrollable sobs. I covered my face under the chador and shook my shoulders, pretending to be crying like all those grownups.

The jingling of the gold-rimmed glasses takes me to a remote coffee house along a windy road on some trip. The owner carries too many glasses in one round brass tray, yet he does it with such skill, not a drop spills. I listen to the gargle of the river nearby and take in the fresh air of the countryside. Next the man places a few small bowls of sugar cubes by our tea and, as flies gather around, he shoos them with the wave of one hand. The tea is too strong and smells of cardamom.

Yes, that simple sound of thin, gold-rimmed glasses shaking in a tray and jingling as they hit one another has stayed within me for decades, waiting for a moment like this to remind me of a cool basement on lazy summer afternoons. I close my eyes and see the happy rounds of tea at Norooz, and then there is the sad tea passed around at funerals. The people are gone, the hourglass-shaped, gold-rimmed glass is gone, and I no longer hear the familiar jingle. Now decades later, my estekan has transformed into a larger, thicker one and in this loneliness, it no longer finds another to jingle against.

As I prepare for yet another Norooz among a crowd that doesn’t know the meaning of the word, once again I’m reminded that, despite the long road home, and regardless of the oceans and mountains in between, I am still there. All I need is a few words with a familiar ring, a few notes of an out-dated piece of music, the soft scent of jasmines or hyacinths and I’m back. I would give up all the privileges of my new life if only I could bring it all back. But going to the place is no longer the same for I know where I belong is not a place. I come from a time long gone, a time when passion was everywhere in the air, where at New Year the world renewed. I am the citizen of a time when all I needed to soothe my soul was the jingle of tea glasses in a round tray that brought us all together.

Charcoal drawing by Sholeh Wolpe

Seyhoun Gallery presents Sholeh Wolpe’s charcoal drawings in celebration of the International Women’s Day. Join us for the opening reception on Saturday March 6, 2009   6-9 pm —  For more information go to:  www.sholehwolpe.com

Art is supposed to, among other things, convey beautiful images and notions. Words and music are supposed to convey exalted concepts and feelings. If all a musician can say through his music is “f…” this and “f…” that, doesn’t that mean that that musician can’t really articulate what he wants to say? I mean, aren’t there other words in the English language that can convey these musicians’ frustration, anger, ennui, hopelessness and helplessness? I hate to sound like grandmothers. But really, what can these “artists” know and feel that John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen didn’t know or feel? How much harder could their lives have been than the lives of Van Gogh and Beethoven? Implicitly or ex- they are saying I want to inject my poetry with vile words to invoke feelings that can’t be otherwise invoked. It’s like they are saying if you don’t bring your children to hear the most vulgar words that I can pronounce out of boredom and lack of talent, then you are doing your children a disservice. I am having trouble digesting that logic. It sounds such a cop out.

-Massud Alemi

From left: Novelists Susanne Pari, Parissa Ebrahimzadeh, Massud Alemi, Zoe Ghahremani and moderator Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak.

VOA is going to interview Parissa Ebrahimzadeh, Zoe Ghahremani and Susanne Pari on Friday and Saturday. This is to promote the upcoming gig (on Saturday) we are having in DC, at Georgetown U. You can see the announcement in the AIAW Events section. I’ll be sure to post some pictures and interesting news after the event.

Only Weapons and Iron and Fire

Do not send me a chain letter with a Psalm
for David and a prayer for soldiers.

Does your prayer have eyes
to find only your soldiers,
the ones with darker uniforms
and a lighter flag, not the soldiers
who wear lighter uniforms
and hold a darker flag?

Do not curse me with a plague
for breaking this chain.

Doesn’t your prayer have eyes?
There are no horses, or chariots.
The soldiers are all dark,
they look alike
and they are bowed down
and fallen.

Esther Kamkar

At the moment there are only 4 people who have signed on and created their profiles on the gmail group. I know it’s hard to imagine the benefits at this point, but benefits we shall reap once everyone is on board. The tricky part is from now until then. So, now…

How can we get members to sign on?

John Sweden - (temporary blog admin) - photo by Esther Kamkar

I want to welcome all the new members here:

Massud (the inaugural new member)
Ari
Manijeh
Farnoosh
Parissa
Siamak
Zohreh (Zoe)

I know there are others considering joining so when you have a moment, it’s easy to do.

When you think of posting something here, don’t feel you have to have something profoundly important to say. It’s ok to just say “Hi”. It’s also ok to be a “lurker” and sit on the fence to see what happens here

I’ve been busy doing a few updates on the AIAW site and replacing that dull news scroller on the home page with something a bit more snappy.

John