misunderstood yearning to break free
*Upon creation, there was one and the polar opposite of one. One was angel, infinity, existence, fulfillment, light, oneness, and the other was the equal opposite, merely a shadow, where light wasn’t, where nothing was, an absence, nothing, zero. Then, the equal opposite objected! What could possibly be more unequal than one versus zero, all versus none? it said. This is not an equal opposite, it is a ghastly manifestation of the question. And thus, to make the playing field even, was born JUSTICE. The shadow, the none, was given the value of negative or minus one, which is in itself a futile concept, there existing no negative in reality. But it simply had to be imagined and created to make the game equal, so it could unfold in the first place.
I BEGAN WRITING THIS BOOK decades ago, and I have already rewritten it a thousand times over, erasing and recasting the past as I went and now go—a past ungraspable like the iridescence of an oil spill. Many selves of mine have come and gone and have yet to come. I have high expectations of my future selves. I want one of them to live with lions. Another to be a seducer of sculptors’ hands. Still another to backpack the wilderness alone. A discoverer of uncharted lands. An Egyptian actress in the Alexandria of Agatha Christie. Jeanne d’Arc. A grande dame, a doyenne with doting admirers seeing her through old age.
In a sense, I began writing my life as it was unfolding, or rather, seeing it through the lens of literature. When I was getting away with pranks in school, I thought I was a hero, funny. Later, as I recalled it, I marveled at the spirited girl who was leading. Now, I see that people don’t want to let others get away with being themselves because they themselves do not have the moxie to. I hung around my outsiders’ circle in college and wailed against “society” that owed us so much. Of our band of outraged, bohemian bosom buddies, one completely abdicated from society, as Susan Sontag put it, living without a phone in a hellish desert, another is a bar pianist in Paris playing for chanteuses, actualizing our “Lost Generation” idyll.
Time flows. New strata of me deposit onto the erased me. My life is alluvial.
This self-portrait, one slice of infinitely curated Creation Stories of me, is captured in print before its erasure. Therefore, it is fiction. But the Truth. A perfectly manicured chocolate cake that is not also a carrot cake or a cheesecake. Nor lemon meringue.
Let’s see if we can trace it all back to the mysterious origins of me, Tortured Artist.
I have no one to blame but myself.
For most of my life, I have felt unworthy.
I thought, or was made to feel, that I was bad. There was from me some expectation of domesticity, because I was born girl. I do not mean I come from the overt kind of patriarchal, honor-killing, Middle Eastern family you might be imagining right about now. No, our brand of patriarchy was more invisible. We are modernized, even Westernized. But herein lies the problem: Misogyny is embedded within Westernized societies that shrewdly deny their own kind of patriarchy, instead pointing fingers to the “barbaric” societies of the East they denigrate in order to colonize.
Being an artist, I betrayed the unspoken expectation of immigrant children—to restore the loss, repay the sacrifices made toward a better life for me in the new world. I think I have failed at this. The burden of this guilt exhausts me.
I backed out of so much. Children. Bourgeoisie. Casual friendships. Being generally “normal.” All in order to write. I bump against my marital life, which provides me with the sustenance necessary to write because I simply cannot swallow the framework that prescribes a specific role from me. (House)Wife.
Even as a full-blown adult, the act I show my father is largely a Theater of Good Wifery. It’s just easier not to debate when I am told I should be taking care of my husband, making him dinner. The taking-care-of-each-other advice goes both ways, but somehow it feels as if the bondage of domesticity is being passed down to me.
I have painted myself into one corner and one corner only.
So you see, I have no one to blame but myself. I was born girl. I became immigrant. I am artist. What the hell else did I expect?
They say that every new work of art redefines all those that came before it, offering a new reading of them, reorganizing them anew in the continuum of our collective imaginations.
Scientists say that each time we recall a memory, it loses fidelity.
Fidelity defined: The quality or state of being faithful; accuracy in details; the degree to which an electronic device (as a record player, radio, or television)—surely also the electric brain—accurately reproduces its effect (as sound or picture).
So we erase each time we remember. Each new recall, each new version then overrides and rewrites the past.
Erosion. Sedimentation. Ad infinitum.
Tehran, Iran, 1976 — Everything starts with this image burned into my memory: the back of a schoolgirl standing at her blue bedroom’s window watching snowfall. She writes four succinct lines in a notebook that is now lost. Somehow she knows this is poetry.
I saw all the whites in the sky, I saw them pile into bulging mounds on branches, I saw solitary flakes melt at the windowsill, I saw the throbbing silence of snowfall, I saw trees stripped to their elements, I saw their stillness and the stirrings beneath the frozen earth, I saw a hushed city, I saw the earnestness in my young parents’ tasks, I saw multitudes and beauty, I saw rivers stream down Mount Damavand, I saw another dimension, forces beyond the known, I saw the unspoken, I saw the mother, I saw the weight and the weightlessness of things, I saw time suspended, I saw the eternal.
| already solitary | |
| voyager | |
| whispers rose up in me | |
| when I was eight | |
| a feeling overcame | |
| from watching silent snowfall | |
| and | a poem was born |
| in my notebook | |
| covered in black plastic | |
| with diamond holograms | |
| four | |
| succinct lines | |
| simple | |
| perfect. | |
|
|
Silence is an animal with two faces:
| 1. | Voluntary silence Silence to breathe Silence into the labyrinth of the self Silence to cleanse Silence to undo and exorcise Silence, that buffer between bodies |
First born: London, England.
First birthday photo: dressed in a dirndl.
Perched at grandfather’s chest
mommy’s