My grandmother died last week. She lived her whole life in an ancient desert city in Iran, not only a strict Muslim, but also a badass feminist that started being a principal of a girls’ school at seventeen. I haven’t seen her in 12 years. She’s been hard of hearing and speaks with a heavy rural accent, so long distance communication was difficult at best.
Worlds away from rural Iran, I was born in Washington, DC. My parents were finishing college (the first in both their families to do so). Shortly after my birth, we returned to the homeland. They had fled Iran during the 1979 revolution, but were aching to raise their kid beside both their close-knit families. My days were full of mehmoonis (house parties), mulberry picking, and fetching fresh naan. In third grade, economic sanctions forced us to come back to the US. My dad had been working for an American company, and would have had to forfeit our entire savings if he’s stayed.
Though we moved stateside, we continued to visit regularly ’till I was seventeen. Soon, though, my art and activism became easily google-able—and it wasn’t the best idea to return to a country where queerness is sometimes punishable by death. After the Iran Deal some months back, I thought perhaps diplomacy would change things.
Then the Iranian government convicted an Iranian-American Washington Post writer. I figured, if working at a prominent newspaper couldn’t get you out, what chance would I have if something went wrong?
And so while my grandma aged, while she lay sick in the hospital beds, I watched helplessly as everyone in the family flew to her. When she passed, I didn’t feel sorrow for a women I knew and loved, no, it was for a woman I would never get to know. Because: politics.
There’s a lot of buzz about the state of Islam in America right now. And in most of my social circles, I’m the only person raised Muslim. So it falls to me to speak to the experience, even though I don’t currently practice. I don’t even know where to start. I fall silent, or end up with the intellectual defense of the Koran as a feminist text, not because I don’t have enough words, but too many.
Where do I begin? How does one explain an oppressed experience in a few sentences? Do I start with explaining the history of US meddling with the Middle East that started before I was born, that created so much of the breeding ground for the modern day terrorists? Or is it better to explain how we worried for the days after 9/11, and the bitter relief at hearing our new American target wasn’t Iran, but our neighbors in Iraq? Or how stories of Muslim hate crimes make me glad my family is mostly assimilated, and then I feel guilty? How I cried in the Islamic art section of the Met because I both hunger for my roots, and am afraid a war would destroy all the priceless history before I can see it again? Maybe we start with the alienation I feel when the reports from Guantanamo came out and nobody was arrested because the innocent men we tortured had Muslim names? Is it even possible to explain how it feels to belong to two countries who both think of you as less-than?
Muslims and Middle Eastern folk are the current favorite American scapegoat, and though I wouldn’t generally conflate the two groups, prejudice and policy blur those distinctions. Our travel is being restricted, visas denied, rights erased. How did the Japanese feel between Pearl Harbor and the camps? What did the Jews tell themselves when rumors of segregation began? Hate brews slowly. I keep wanting to say that a Muslim ID isn’t really possible, there’s no way things could ever get that bad. But they have before. And they can again. A few weeks ago I walked by protests that told me and my people to “go back where we came from” and how the “sand n***ers should be left to kill themselves.” The news isn’t safe, social media isn’t safe, the mosques aren’t safe, the sidewalks aren’t safe.
So I guess, what I really want to say is I’m scared. Scared, and angry. I know the simple fact: hate begets hate. When you spit on someone, tell them they are unworthy, send drones to their hometown, financially devastate their country, jail and torture their relatives, accuse their children of making bombs, defile their places of worship… is this supposed to lead to peace?
I want to say there’s hope. That there’s a solution. But honestly, it’s bigger than you or me. There’s no easy answer to undo this, but there’s small steps. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it in his brilliant book about racism in America, our job is to choose “struggle over hope.” Hope is a lullaby. Struggle is facing discomfort: calling out prejudice, reading real histories, asking hard questions, understanding why America continues to need a scapegoat to make it run. It’s rough out here, and the view sucks. But being cast as a Muslim in America is a reminder to stay vigilant, a reminder that what I want is to live in a country that doesn’t need to profit off the backs of minorities. Where war isn’t part of what makes the backbone of the economy. Where keeping a “developing world” is necessary to be a “developed world.” Because that means somebody is always losing. And right now, the losers are my people.
