Man dost daram ke yek rooz iran ra bebinam

As I sat on the couch putting return address stickers and stamps on RSVP reminders/change of reception venue envelopes and watching the Daily Show‘s dissection of the current situation in Iran I was reminded, loudly, that I don’t know my own language. That is to say, the language of my people, Farsi. Seeing as how my mother is from Tehran, Iran I should have some basis of knowledge for the language but I don’t and I’ve begun wondering why that is. Perhaps this pondering is a result of time, that I’m now ready to define the culture of my choosing as I prepare to get married. Before such momentous and life changing events its perfectly natural, the television tells me, for one to reassess where they are in this world and who they are. Here’s what I’ve figured out:

When I was young enough to understand and my mother was tired of listen to me asking questions I was told about Iran. My mother told me stories about living in the city and riding on the handle bars of her friend’s bikes, quickly adding “but don’t do that because a friend of mine got killed doing that”. She told me that she would have to go up to the roof and shovel snow as we drove home from the park one summer in her 1985 Dodge Wagon, saying that they worried the weight would be too much and the snow might crash through, damaging those below. (Aside: I just realized I never asked her if they lived in a house or flat.)

After one of these enchanting stories of the old country I told her I wanted to go there and see where she lived. Now, my mother isn’t a bad person. She doesn’t tell lies for the sake of lying or deceive her children on principal. Its clear now what her intentions were and why she responded the way she did but back then it didn’t make much sense. She responded by tell me that we wouldn’t be going back. She told me that because we are Baha’is the government didn’t like us very much, a fact I had learned years before in a newsreel or conversation I had with someone somewhere, and would not be happy if we arrived in their country. That was why they had to flee, my mother and her family, Tehran and move to Texas. The Revolution taking its firm hold on the country, my grandfather recognized it was time to leave so he packed up my uncle, aunt, and grandmother to meet my mother and other aunt in Arlington, Texas. Of course, the trip wasn’t that simple; there are stories I’ve been told about Turkey and various countries in Europe and Asia they had to stay in for a few months before being granted immigrant status in the US, but that’s a story for a different time. She then told me something that shaped my future view of the country of her birth, that if she returned the government would consider her a whore.

In Iran, a Baha’i marriage is meaningless and “married women” are labeled as whores because they and their “husbands” refused a Muslim marriage, the most prominent of a handful of recognized marriages in a country ruled by and designed around Islam. This became doubly worse as she had “married” an American man. She told me my father might be killed and her imprisoned (I realize now that my father wouldn’t be killed but simply imprisoned also) and possibly forced to marry a Muslim man. That my sister and I (my youngest sister wouldn’t be born for another six years) might be given to a Muslim family and that I would, more than likely, be sent to serve in the military.

This, obviously, scared the shit out of me. “My mom’s not a whore, you ‘mother’s of dogs,’” (translated from Farsi; swears being the only Farsi words I can still recall) I thought aloud, my mother responding nonverbally in a way I now understand as being lost in her own fear. It was that fear that drove the car now and steered the conversation to something, in her mind, more productive like soccer or math, things she loved as a child growing up in Tehran and still clung to. The things that weren’t ruined by the Revolution and her fleeing the country of her birth to live, by her self, and attend college at UT Arlington.

Its a bizarre twist that she will now root for the Iranian soccer team at the World Cup in South Africa. That she will question why I’m booing and cheering on their opposition. It makes perfect sense to me. They and that flag represents the moment in history when my mother instilled fear and loathing for a country based on her own experience.

So that leads us to today where rioters and protesters are using facebook and other social networking sites to coordinate their marches in direct opposition to the edict the government created years ago, under the guise of Islam, to quell unrest. Where a people who love their country so much that they must lash out against the government and policies that have consumed and perverted their culture. And I shouldn’t support violence, I know. I shouldn’t support these or any other actions against a government as their are better, less violent, and more unifying ways of resolving the problems that currently plague Iran, but I can’t help it. I want Iran to be a country I can be proud of. The country of my mother’s birth. The country of my Faith’s birth. I just keep hoping that these protesters can revitalize Iran and return it to its rightful place as a powerhouse of invention and peace instead of oppression and degradation. And if these chants are any indication, my childhood dream of going to Tehran to see where my mother was raised may come true sooner than I thought.

Esm e man, Faroz. Man az Iran hastam.