In Persian, most stories begin with yekeh boud, yekeh naboud. This serves the same purpose as “once upon a time,” in English fairytales. The direct translation is there once was a being, yet there was no one. Persian stories begin at the beginning of time, at creation. They acknowledge the reader’s quest to identify the “I,” but signal that no one is there. There’s no there, there. The literature generously advises the reader to stop looking for a source. Yet Persian also seems to know that despite the sage advice, you’ll continue to seek the source of creation, so the story goes on.
I earlier wrote about my experience of emigrating from Mashhad to Virginia. I used “I” to describe those events. I was five years old then, present for the journey, but not the protagonist of that story. I wasn’t the one who made the decision to leave. Nor did I want to stay. Was it right for me to use the first-person English form when telling that story? Would it have been more accurate to use the Persian pronoun ou, meaning he, she, or it; the French on, meaning one, or someone?
I remember the action of leaving Iran. The airports. Our weeks in Germany in transit. I was there. I remember being there. I did those things that I wrote about, although the details were hazy and later described to me by my parents. They were fully present in those decisions. Present, as in physically there, and also present in spirit. Mind, body and spirit unified.
In my own body and spirit, while writing that section, I struggled to place myself at the center of the story. The decision to leave Iran is their story, not mine. But it’s also my story because I am here now in the U.S. having accompanied them. I feel I must now reconcile these stories to help both me and the reader to better understand what has happened.
I’m told by my parents, “We came to America for you.”
Is that my story? The story of a woman whose parents thought it was best for her to be moved to America as a young girl and spend the rest of her life untangling where the “I” fits into her life, after a childhood embroiled in “We” and “Us” and “Them.”
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We immigrated to Virginia in August 1983. By September, I was registered in elementary school in Alexandria as a first grader. I went straight into English as a Second Language (ESL) class. My brother started in fourth grade.
Our first American home was a three-bedroom apartment rental. We lived in a tall building about ten miles outside Washington, D.C. Our building stood out among the others on the street, its former white façade grayed from years of exposure to smog and pollution. Whenever my parents gave directions to people coming to visit us, they would finish with, “It’s the big white one on that road. Yes, yes, with all the balconies.”
Each unit of its forty floors had a balcony, which was our outdoor play area, so we didn’t have to play in the streets. Back home in Mashhad, Maman told us, only poor children played in the streets. There, we had a private courtyard for our house, which was where our cousins met us for games. We weren’t necessarily rich, having a courtyard put us in the middle class in Mashhad at the time.
Baba used the little bit of money he managed to bring from Iran to buy part ownership of a Texaco gas station which he operated with an Iranian friend, someone he knew from Mashhad. The station was about two miles away from our apartment.
Maman began working retail jobs while my brother and I were in school. My ESL class was small, just me and two other girls, sisters from Afghanistan. I was excited to meet them. Some Afghans speak Dari, a dialect of Persian. I could make new friends, I thought. The sisters were about a year ahead of me. They used their advantage to toy with me, mistranslating words when I needed help. They told me one day that the teacher said I could leave class early, when in fact she had said the opposite, that I needed to stay late to finish some assignments. They laughed at my confusion, while I stared down at my notebook, cheeks burning.
As I was learning to speak English at school, we still spoke Persian at home. My parents insisted that Arash and I speak Persian as much as possible. The rule was that we speak it with each other, with them, and all their friends at all times. No exceptions.
“I don’t understand any English,” Maman would say any time I tried to practice my new language skills on her. I knew she understood because she had studied English in college in Iran. Also, she was an adult, so I assumed she understood everything. “You’ll appreciate it one day,” she responded to my frustration. We didn’t want to speak Persian, Arash and I. We wanted to learn to get along as quickly as possible, hanging out with our new potential friends at school. Yet, we obliged.
“We know it’ll slow down their learning English …” I overheard Maman say with a shrug to a friend about the Persian-only rule.
Memoir requires that I write about the “I” of my body, my physical location, in English, the language I know best, using a vocabulary littered with personal pronouns – I, you, he, she it, we, and they. I can’t tell you my story because I’m still untangling it from their story. You want to know about me, the “I” in my story, though my spirit is a “We.” English, with its disdain for the passive voice, limits me. Things happened to me, without any reference to how I felt or what I wished.
Writing my story requires that I take on a point of view that I didn’t experience. I long for a language that acknowledges that at times the narrator must tell the story that is not hers, even when she was there in the middle of the story. I could write with a third-person narrative, using the pronoun “they” to recount what happened. Yet my physical body was there, in the settings I describe. If I use the pronoun “They,” it puts me in a role where I’m distancing myself from every part of the story. I desire a language that recognizes its own limits. One that could represent our dualities, that our voice and our spirits are not unified with our bodies. Through our stories, we are just passing through. We are just conduits of experiences from earlier generations, carrying them from times before to be passed on to the next.
Is that my story? The story of a woman who was brought to America by her parents so she can serve as a translator of their experiences? Speaking to the foreigners, the Americans, about Iran?
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N.S. Goli is a writer born in Iran who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s with family. The author currently resides in Virginia, researching and teaching as a business school professor while working on a memoir about identity and belonging among the Iranian diaspora.
Lightwood 