Sa’id goes missing. Forty years later, my mama tells me his poems got into the wrong hands. It is the night before our flight to Tehran. We pack belongings into suitcases on her bed. The wrong hands are either the old regime’s SAVAK or the new regime’s Basij. Either way, Sa’id is dead now. My mama pulls my journal from the pile and flips through its poems, then shows me a photograph she has saved. Beneath its glossy finish, Sa’id remains eighteen. It is always the year of his death. I trace with my pinky finger the image of his parted lips, thin and delicate. His lashes are so long I want to press mine against his. Promise me, my mama says. Do not become a writer. …
Yasmine Ameli
In another story, my baba bozorg paints flowers. He is little. His name Amir means shah, but the shah is Shah, so Shah makes all the little amirs and all the big amirs change their names. My baba bozorg becomes Farhad on …
Nanny’s husband is dead, and her six children are growing. Every morning, she readjusts her one fake eye and walks to the textile factory where she works until her fingers shake. What my mama doesn’t tell me is that the revolution, even now in the ’60s, is arriving like the buzz on a kitchen timer: the poor are very poor, and the rich—well that’s how Nanny becomes Nanny. One day, the factory president offers Nanny a job that pays more. She cooks. She cleans. She moves into my mama’s childhood home and tells her stories about the imams before she kisses her goodnight. A child myself at this first telling, I probe underneath the story’s plastic wrap—only to jerk back when it recasts my mama as stranger. Every morning Nanny fixed breakfast, she says. Then she ate on the floor by the door. Like a dog. She ate from separate bowls and spoons. I probe, and what about the six children? The truth is that my mama and her family never even saw the revolution coming. Poor Nanny, my mama says. She loved us more. Forty years and a continent apart from revolution, the character across from me kisses me goodnight. …
Amoo Hoshang sends the babas up the trunks to shake the branches, the cousins to the roots with strips of cloth. My mama, still decades from mothering me, eats figs, sour cherries, peaches. She sucks at the fruit until her eyes swell from pollen and the juice stings split skin and her stomach bulges so full she wants to vomit. The cousins make up their own name for the orchard: deh, little village. In my American school, buzz-cut boys only know Iran as a news story, an axis to bomb, but in this story?—fairy-tale anemoia: from the dried slabs Mama buys in bulk, I taste fresh figs off a tree. My mama tastes it too. Our bodies warm from the other’s heat under covers, she tells me she misses Shah. She says, I didn’t know then that those were the good days. The way she tells it, the cousins always sleep in one big room at night, and they hide fruit under pillows like alms. It is years before I begin reading history books, before I learn to ask, why do you miss SAVAK? In both of these countries I come from, once the grown-ups sleep, the children open every window. …