The Portable Roya a Selection of Favorite Essays Commentary: An
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The Portable Roya A Selection of Favorite Essays Commentary: An Iranian refugee on becoming American – legally, then in spirit Reuters Aug. 24, 2016 It’s lucky that my mother and I were admitted as refugees to America before the topic of immigration became so contentious. If the current laws were to change to add skills or financial requirements, we could have never gotten in. Hell, I myself, a bitter teenager then, thought us perfectly useless and was stunned that anybody wanted us at all. We came empty-handed in 1985, without even suitcases to declare at Customs. And without any English, for that matter. On my first outing with a young man I dearly wanted to impress, I did not understand the waitress when she asked if I preferred Coke to Pepsi. What I had a lot of was anger. Anger at having been ejected from my homeland, Iran. Anger at having lost not only the people and places I loved, but, above all, the language I adored and had hoped to make a career writing in. Anger at the elite who had promised that the 1979 revolution would bring us freedom and democracy. Anger at America because I was the product of the post-revolutionary education system that blared “Death to America” every morning in the schoolyard. Having objected to America for so long to now be at its mercy was no picnic. That anger hardly subsided because curious, kind-hearted folks would readily, unknowingly, summon it: “Where are you from?” Hearing my answer, they would gasp and offer this in sympathy: “You must be delighted to be here!” 1 Back then, I felt as delighted as a chickadee would in a fox’s grip. When I passed through the revolving doors at New York’s JFK airport, the size of all that I saw – people, SUVs, highways crisscrossing overhead – dwarfed me. I have forgotten a great many things about those early days, but my desultoriness is not among them. In between my expired maroon Iranian passport and the blue American one came a white booklet, not a passport, but a travel document. White was symbolically apt for that bleached out state between arrival and citizenship, that existential no-man’s-land. A twilight space where one loosens her hold on the old identity, while not having yet earned the new. I introduced myself as a “nowhereian” in those days, when bygone fears still haunted me. The sight of the lowliest government employees, uniformed guards at any gate, unnerved me. Trusting the advice of officials, from immigration to resettlement workers, did not come easily for it required a complete suspension of all the knowledge I had arrived with. Over time, incremental changes accrued, tiny deposits into an account of belonging. They came through small but essential encounters. The oath of allegiance, however significant, is often only a ceremonious hour, not one of reckoning. But watershed events and crises offer shortcuts through that journey to belonging. September 11 for instance. By 10 a.m. on that day, my 75-year-old father who until then had been composing poem after poem about his yearning for Tehran had hung an American flag from the railings of the fourth- floor balcony of my parents’ Queens apartment. It remains the only illicit act he has ever committed here, for he knew well the co-op board did not approve of exterior displays. It was what he was compelled to do as he was overpowered by an unexpected tide of grief for the adopted country which had thus far seemed invulnerable to him. As we silently stared at Manhattan’s smoldering skyline, we wept for the dead, but also for the surge of a love we had not packed at departure. We were overcome, too, by the clear sense we had as to on which side of that sinister smoke we stood. By then, the anger had subsided. This happened not merely because time moderates all passions, but because the joyful experiences which had once been denied me tilted the balance of the spirit. A pivotal shift came with those joys: A second arrival of sorts, this time not at a country, but at an insight. I saw that unlike what I was once led to believe, life’s purpose was not to give oneself up through sacrifice but to live – fully, richly, curiously. 2 When I left Iran, music was banned, and hijab was mandatory. Years later, when I finally jogged barefoot on a beach, hair bouncing in the wind, music blasting in my ears, I knew I had been bestowed a splendid gift – one I could never again live without. A few months ago, my children’s fourth grade class was studying the subject of immigration and I was invited to address the group. Standing before dozens of 10-year-olds, I was just the living moral show-and-tell the teachers needed to drive home their lesson. One child asked how I had been able to make such a big adjustment. I said, “Because at my poorest, America embraced me unconditionally like families accept each other regardless of any flaws or strengths.” For their rapt lot, I animated the narrative of the American melting pot and why it melts better than the rest. At moments like these, I marvel at my own keen sense of duty and citizenship. It is among those who are born American that I realize I am here to remind them of their rare gift. So many revolutions fail. But few succeed, fewer still succeed as well as the American revolution of 1776. Those generations who are born in the relative comfort and security of its legacy are prone to forget that original covenant. Which is where we, the formerly useless, once empty-handed, now full-hearted, naturalized citizens come in. POLITICO LETTER FROM AMERICA Lady Liberty’s dimming light A savage stroke of the pen makes America into the country we were told to fear. 3/6/17 NEW YORK — If a debate, and the sentiments it subsequently evokes, can ever undo a nation’s character, the debate over “the wall,” the banning of immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations and the refusal to take in refugees, is doing so to the United States. 3 In recent weeks, the U.S., the promised land for the persecuted everywhere, has seen its Jewish cemeteries vandalized, brown-skinned immigrants assaulted and several mosques and Muslim establishments attacked. Refugees are being rejected by a public that hardly has any knowledge of who they are and what they bring to our communities. Thirty years ago, I was one such refugee. I arrived in the U.S. just as Lady Liberty knows: Tired and poor, with only a backpack on my back and a few words of English in my lexicon. In me, the adolescent angst and anger stirred more than the average teenager, perhaps because of an ugly year in transit and an uprooting from my homeland Iran, to which, despite the bleakest of circumstances, I felt profoundly attached. My affluent compatriots, whose extravagant lifestyles are the stuff of reality shows like the “Shahs of Sunset,” made up the first wave of arrivals in the tumultuous days before or immediately after the 1979 revolution. They fled, in great part, to bring their wealth to safety. Choosing America, the Supreme Leader’s arch enemy, was the greatest gamble of our lives. For most of the rest of us, those who left long after the revolution, especially in the aftermath of several waves of arrests leading up to the 2009 Green Movement, the sale of everything we ever owned carried us only as far as a third country, an in-between location with a U.S. embassy. The one in Tehran had been shut down on November 4, 1979, in the aftermath of the ignominious hostage crisis. By the time travel costs, room and board and various legal and visa processing fees were paid for, we had used up the last of our scarce dollars. Those of us who came to the U.S. in this second and third wave of immigration had already been intensely “vetted” by Tehran — and we had failed the test. Under the clergy’s dogmatic reign, we had been relegated to the margins of society and fled to bring ourselves to safety. The U.S. and much of the Western world have been engaged in an undeclared war with Iran for nearly 40 years. We, the post-revolutionary order’s bonafide misfits — gays, Jews, artists, Baha’is, secular intellectuals and scientists, Iranian Sunnis, new converts to Christianity, Kurdish liberation activists, women’s rights advocates, prisoners of conscience — have been the real warriors. Choosing America, the Supreme Leader’s arch enemy, was the greatest gamble of our lives. It was comforting to discover that, contrary to all the propaganda we had once been subjected to, Americans did not bare their teeth or graze us with their claws (metaphors courtesy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, not mine). The America we experienced — vast, 4 open, free, and generous — was not the America we had been told to fear. Our encounters with our new home stood in sharp contrast to the official narrative and opened another front in the undeclared war between Iran and America. In the decades since 1979, diplomats and policymakers looked for ways to undo what residual distrust may have lingered among Iranians from the CIA’s misadventures in 1953 and thereafter. Still, nothing has been as effective as the wistful narrative that the diaspora passed along to those still on the inside.