Exile Is a Prison

36 years...

at my barbie birthday party in Iran

Thirty six years ago, this week, my mother and I left Iran.

That night, as we entered the airport, her hand tightly clasped around mine, she knelt down beside me, looked sternly into my eyes and said, “Do not say a single word until the airplane takes off. Not even if someone speaks to you. You stay quiet.”

I was only nine years old, but understood the gravity of her directive. Turning each word over in my mind, I committed them to memory. What was implied is that we could be caught. Prohibited from leaving. Or worse, that my mother could be arrested, taken away and executed, as my father had been six months earlier.

I did not want all of this to happen. I did not want to lose my mom, too. And, I did not want to be the cause of this tragedy, the bearer of its fault. I was so frightened. Swallowing my fear and tears, which were about to erupt, I pressed my lips tightly together and breathe as little as possible.

I prayed to disappear as we made our way through the airport, through security, to a special desk where they searched for our names on a list of those prohibited from leaving and eventually onto the airplane.

…

I said we “left” Iran. But, I want to be precise. Did we escape? Flee? What is the word for having to leave when one desperately wants to stay? Refugee? Exile?

I was too young for all of that.

What I understood was that I did not want to leave my home — even though Iran scared me; even though I’d grown up in a war, my bedroom walls shaking through bombings; even though I was a little girl terrified of being kidnapped and beaten because my hair was exposed beneath my hijab; even though I had become keenly aware of my mortality and that of my loved ones; even though my dad had been taken and killed.

I did not want to leave my country, my family, my friends, my toys, my street with its towering birch trees that created a canopy beneath which I learned to ride my bike.

I did not want to leave for any other place, not even America with its promises of “freedom,” its fast food restaurants and fountains of Coca Cola, its shelves stocked full of Nesquik and Lucky Charms, not even for its icons, who were already my icons — Mini Mouse, Madonna and Michael Jackson.

I did not want to leave my home, my country.

…

As we drove away, I promised our house I’d come back one day. Glued to the rear window of the taxi, I watched it get smaller and smaller until it disappeared and we turned off our street for the last time.

…

Yesterday I saw on Instagram that someone I know is back in Iran after nearly two decades. He posted photos of the graffiti, the fruit vendors, the shrines, each with a geotag that I clicked, hoping to recognize the sites and streets of my home. But it’s been too long. I don’t know any of it any more. Even my memories have faded.

I messaged him, asking for more pictures — my hunger insatiable.

”Sixteen years of being away just ended,” he wrote back.

I re-read his text. The phrasing struck me.

Exile is a prison, I thought.

…

I ask myself why does this week, marking 36 years, feel so significant? Maybe because I’m now the last age my dad was when he was alive. Maybe because he was 36 when he had me. I want the symmetry to be meaningful. Am I searching for hope or mining for despair?

…

Today, 36 years after my mom and I left Iran, I was on the phone with an immigration attorney. My spouse is obtaining a Canadian citizenship at my behest. He is trans and being here scares me for him. But it scares me for me, too. And so, my spouse is pursuing this other passport for my sake. And, just in case.

“I want to stay and make this place good,” he says. “But I don’t want you to have to go through what happened there again.”

I didn’t arrive here as a refugee thinking I’d ever have to leave as one.

But, watching ICE agents tackle mothers and fathers and students to the ground; watching universities withhold diplomas from graduates who speak out against genocide; watching the administration attempt to silence artist and writers; watching Adriana Smith, who is brain dead, be kept alive as an incubator for a fetus; watching trans people be mercilessly bullied; watching doctors afraid to perform life saving procedures for fear of arrest — all under the guise of “god” — is a story I’ve watched unfold in real-time before. And I don’t know that I can do it again.

…

I want to say there is no hierarchy of pain. But I don’t believe that.

While I can’t go back to Iran, while that is no longer even my home, while this place became home, and might not be again, I know there are refugees and migrants who are escaping unspeakable violence and poverty. They don’t have the option of another country. They are coming here as a last resort. Coming from such pain that the pain this country will inflict upon them is more bearable in comparison.

…

In middle school, in a suburb of Seattle, I learned the word emigrate. I emigrated from... I repeated it over and over: I emigrated from…I emigrated from…

All the while, I tried to commit Iran’s map to memory. But that, faded too. I know the shape of it — a cat. But I can’t place Kermanshah, the home of my maternal Kurdish family, or Shiraz where my father is from, or Shomal where we vacationed or even Tehran any more.

…

That night as the airplane finally took off, I sobbed, looking down on the lights of the city, already dreaming of my return.

I didn’t know I’d never go back. That I would always search for a place where I could feel like I belonged. That as I gained a new language I’d lose so much of my mother-tongue, and with it my connection to the dirt and the trees of my ancestors. That I’d lose my culture and traditions and that one day I’d watch, with rage and envy, videos of white American and European travel influencers who get to go to Iran and make money posting about it.

…

An Iranian friend of mine is vacationing with her family in Azerbaijan. She plans to take her 80-year-old mother to the border, so that she can see Iran again — after more than forty years in exile.

A few years ago, my older brother who is a pilot flew over Iranian airspace for the first time in his career. He spoke in Farsi to the air traffic controllers and marveled at his proximity to our home, at his connection to those men, as he told me this story.

A few years before that, I spent a week in Sharjah and Dubai, in the UAE. The closest I’ve come to Iran in all these years.

On the first morning I woke up with the song of the call to prayer, which I’d forgotten about. Hearing it, I turned toward the window and sobbed for all that was left behind.