I am in my aunt Simin’s kitchen in Mashad and we are cooking lavoshac, the original Persian version of fruit rollup. We pull the stems off kilos of fresh sour cherries, pull out their pits and drop them into a large pot on the stove. She teaches me the sounds of common talk. I listen with my rough Farsi, often sure I’m mistaken about everything I hear. When her cleaning lady arrives, Simin claims that she is late, tells her she is lazy, mocks her for complaining about something going on in her family. I understand what she says. I am silent, but not because I don’t have anything to say. I knew Simin felt shut-in. The world she had thrived in for the first 35 years of her life shrank suddenly, in the late 70’s. I can almost imagine that meanness to another human was simply her ramming up against those walls. Maybe she would have been mean no matter what had happened to her country. We stir the big kettle of cherries cooking down to what will become a paste, then a dried fruit sheet. The fruit needs to cook slowly, sugars diffusing, flavor deepening.
***
In Iran, a taxi driver taught me what to look at.
***
I see the woman at the end of the off-ramp in north Tehran. One plastic grocery sack hanging on each wrist and hair tucked in an amber headscarf. She stands on her island of sidewalk, as if expecting someone. Gazes in to each driver, then lets go. Taxi driver says, she is working. No one can accuse her of doing anything wrong. She is alone and she is standing and holding her shopping. Her body leans discreetly towards the road. I twist to look as long as I can. Want to see a slow down, conversation, how she gets in carefully.
***
I had never been in a cherry orchard, and when my uncle Reza learns this he arranges for him, Simin, and me to drive to a friend’s, outside the city. We spend the morning moving from tree to tree, free to be haphazard about the harvest, to pull whole handfuls at once into our baskets and our cardboard boxes, nestle them into the trunk of Reza’s old Peykan, to imagine that the weight of all of them brings us down closer to the earth as we idle home. I take video on my camera of our stained hands, Simin on a ladder, the lush treetops, the sounds of my lips smacking when I sample the cherries. Later I make a short film to send to friends and family with “In My Life,” by the Beatles, as the soundtrack.
***
I stop believing I know why I’m here.
***
My cousin Mahnaz was 16 when I visited her in Esfahan. I was 34. She was born shortly after the Islamic Revolution. While she talks about her country she begins to cry. “I can criticize it, but I love Iran so much and I wish all of us younger people could put it on our shoulders to make it better.” After her University entrance exams, she left for several years, went to school in England, has recently returned to make a professional life in Iran. Mahnaz’s parents taught their children to be proud of where they came from. And how to be angry when the country changed in ways they couldn’t accept.
***
Foreigners write Wikipedia entries shrinking the place: list current despots, convince themselves there is little left to know. I–we–Iranians know better. The borders won’t hold the people. A bursting could happen. They want more, are public relations wizards at heart. Can’t shut off their impulse to tell stories about themselves.
***
I am trying to explain what it feels like to have not come from a place and to have come from the very same place.
***
I returned to Iran as an adult in 2001. I visited the mosque in Naeen, the town where my parents’ grandparents were born. It is the only time I was ever there. How can I help you see the mosque made of bricks in this town from which both my parents descend? If you can’t see the color of the bricks, I’ll be lying. You’ll get to a place you think you know, one you don’t need me to get you to, already shaded in by rote. It’s the tide of those already imagined ideas I fight off. For over a decade, I have tried to explain by describing the bricks as butter yellow. Butter yellow: great aunts and uncles in the dust of the courtyard; surely you notice? A mosque, yellow cream, earthy, rooted and rooting me into it. Naeen, town of my ancestors. I could take you back two hundred years. A breeze in the courtyard carries the voices of people with my name.
***
It is a balmy spring weekday and I am walking with a new friend on the grass-lined path next to the Zayendeh River in Esfahan. Hundreds of people on either side of this urban river are doing the same. In front of us, two men lock arms and clasp their hands as they cross the Sio-se Pol bridge, disappearing into the line of people and thirty-three stone arches. I think of fatwas, I think of the rules this breaks back home. Two men, fond of each other, announcing: we’re friends.
***
None of my relatives would confess to unbelief. Do I shame them when I claim it for myself? They instructed their children how to pray: where to face, how the body changes, as it kneels and curves over itself. How soothing to try to get closer to god, or just be outside near the mosque’s walls with other people. I eavesdropped and it happened to me, chronically faithless, standing there listening for them: I felt their elbows brush mine, heard the blood moving even under all those clothes.
***
Esfahan is where my father is born, and where I turn 35. I surrender to a compulsion to call him, tell him where I am. I was a toddler the last time he went to Iran. He is a shy person, someone who doesn’t tell stories of his childhood. For the first time in my life, I can ask him questions about that time, and he sometimes has something to say. I ask about the scores of cats I hear my grandfather cared for, yarns about his tender heart and the way he took in strays. My father mocks him — stupid tendency towards feline friends. Another story he tells just once: he is a teenager, school honors, a prize in his hand, they stroll home together. His father is mute.
***
Ghormeh sabzi tastes different in Iran, and so does the lamb. I realize that lamb has terroir, like wine. The flavors last long in the mouth, burnished and tender. Eating in Iran is as familiar as my mother’s kitchen. So it isn’t that travel experience. It’s this other one: The smell of that working-class obgushteri in Esfahan etches its memory on the meal. Joy can come from a bowl of soup. Sitting in the courtyard café of Abbasi Hotel on a tart spring evening makes the noodles in the Ash-e Reshteh a rediscovery, soaked through with lemon and parsley.
***
I lived alone for a month in a relative’s Teheran apartment. I was determined to navigate a capital city of seventeen million, hoping not to stick out, unsure it really mattered if I did. I find my way to the women-only Metro car when the train pulls into the station. I’m as nervous as I’ve ever been traveling, sure I’ll attract attention. Whatever I do, I will always be the American-Iranian who has arranged myself into a long manteau, sleeves pushed down to the wrist for modesty, the top button buttoned over my chestbone and my head wrapped in a pashmina-like hijab–the one thing I wear I think is pretty. I carry something to read, a book that’s not in Farsi, as much as I wish it were. I also hold a map, try to keep it hidden. Track the stations as we pass through them. I don’t want to miss the one near the Jom’eh market, where I’m aimed. I stand for the whole ride. I make way for the older women with their full-length chadors, who drag carts for shopping into our car. Out the window I see young men in short sleeves waiting in a huddle at their stop. I’m trying to really reside here, take up the things I’ve explored before, without depending on family to get me around. I feel like I’m holding my breath. I check the map each time the train slows down to stop, and strain to parse out the names as they are called on the PA.
***
I try for several months to write a poem. Instead, I write an op-ed that I never publish (but read to audiences) called, “You Should Go To Iran.” I want to introduce Americans to the young women I meet who say they are comfortable with headscarves, to the strangers who invite Americans into their homes and feed them sweets and tea. All of this takes place in the months immediately following 9/11. I feel funneled to the center of a much bigger storm than an individual could ever quell. It feels like I am saying the same thing over and over: don’t ruin my country, except that I stumble on the word my. It isn’t a lie. Iran will continue to stake out space in my internal life. But it isn’t accurate. I have the choice to defend Iran, and I suspect I could get away with not doing so. But that’s probably not true. In my heart I know Iran owns me.
Farnaz Fatemi is a poet, teacher and editor living in Santa Cruz, CA. She received her MFA from Mills College and has taught in the writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz for eighteen years. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Squaw Valley Review, Catamaran Literary Review, Ekphrastic (nominated for a Pushcart), and Red Wheelbarrow. Her poems and prose have been anthologized in Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora and Love and Pomegranates. She also wrote the libretto for the opera, Dreamwalker.