Aliyeh

Kristina Seid-Mosaffa

It’s getting cold here. I shuffle from room to room, moving this, dusting that—just trying to keep warm, you know? I think of the Iranian women who wear head scarves and long sleeves and imagine they’re pretty happy right now. Winter is probably a relief after sweating all summer for Allah.

Occasionally I toy with the idea of wearing one myself. I have a few, some really luscious silk ones that my father brings back from Iran every year. Something I can tuck my ears under to maintain warmth. I never will. It only seems like cheating if I do it. The moment I step outside they’ll know I’m just a poser, they’ll know I’m not even a real Iranian. They might even think I’m mocking their dedication with my fancy silk scarf I don’t even know how to tie.

My father likes to talk about the trip we’ll take to Iran in the distant future, this epic pilgrimage that will help me understand his world. His world, he says. I’m half of him but his world can never be mine. He brings back videos from Iran, each one a relic. I watch them, enraptured by these women—my aunts, he says, so strange to hear—making precise carrot matchsticks for khoresht. I can’t cut carrots that thinly—I’ve tried.
Sometimes I dream about Iran. I see these women—no, my aunts—waiting for me at the airport with a carrot and a knife. With my father as interpreter, they demand I cut this Iranian carrot into perfect matchsticks, a cultural initiation rite if you will. They cluck their tongues as I cut, imbuing my father with shame, and in the end they exclaim “Who is she? No proper Iranian girl would ever cut such badly shaped matchsticks, you must send her back. She does not belong here.”

Did I mention that I hate carrots?

I get scared when people mention Iran. My shoulders hunch and I fold in on myself, hoping they won’t notice I’m not completely white. Not me, it’s not me. I’m just a white American with a nice tan. “Oh, you’re a terrorist,” they’ll tease me, and I fear that under their sarcastic tone they fear that I really am. They don’t understand what it means to be Iranian and neither do I. When I say I’m half-white, half-Iranian, they tell me, “So you’re Iranian,” and I think not at all.

Once my father handed me the phone so I could talk to his brother—my uncle, what a word!—and we ran an awkward loop like two parrots with only one line to say apiece. “How are you!?” “I’m fine.” “How are you!?” “I’m fine.” All his English in the world: how are you? But how could I have judged? I couldn’t even tell him hello (Google says it’s “salam”). I can say airplane, ice cream, peach, eggplant, whey, soup, and freeway. I could have listed these to my uncle—maybe he would have leaned over to his wife to tell her that I’m not completely useless after all. And maybe she would have responded, “But who learns to say ‘whey’ but not ‘hello?’”

Last year, my father showed me a picture of his mother, my grandmother, the woman whose name became my middle name. She was sitting in the garden of her house, hair uncovered, snapping the ends off green beans. She looked like me. She was beautiful. And I realized that I couldn’t say grandma or green beans or beautiful in Farsi. I couldn’t put anything into words that she could have understood.

When she died, my father stayed in bed and cried all day. I was only four and I couldn’t understand why my father, a bushy-faced bear of a man, would cry so hard over someone I didn’t even know. Fifteen years later, I cried looking at her picture, looking at the woman who was so much a part of me and yet I’d never even heard her voice or seen her face until that moment. My Iranian grandmother.

I’m lost. I’m petrified Iran will start something, will throw America into outrage and I’ll end up sacrificed as a representation of a country I’ve never even seen. Never mind I’m not Muslim, never mind I’m just as white as my mother, never mind that I can’t make perfect carrot matchsticks for khoresht. Iran lives inside me whether I want it to or not. My last name, the honor of my grandfather, is synonymous with all the political faux pas of the Middle East. I want to scream at the people who tell me I’m Iranian, “You don’t even know what that means! I wear short sleeves and eyeshadow and maul carrots—they don’t want me! I’m just like you, I can barely point out Iran on a map, I still have trouble pronouncing Tehran—hell, I don’t even pronounce my last name right! How can I be Iranian then?”

But I’m also afraid of losing even that little bit of what I have. I will stare at the ceiling above my bed and repeat those words in Farsi over and over again: airplane, ice cream, peach, eggplant, whey, soup, freeway. I’ll never forget, I tell myself. To my aunts and uncles in Iran, this is nothing. To those second-generation that can speak Farsi and know how to tie a silk head scarf, it’s probably laughable, maybe even shameful.
But to my grandmother, the beautiful woman in the picture, the loving woman in my heart, it’s enough. To her I am Iranian enough; to her my matchsticks are perfect. Every time I write my middle name, I hear her voice. Aliyeh, she says to me, I love you. Tell me what you know, I want to hear you speak.

Airplane, ice cream, peach, eggplant, whey, soup, freeway.