For Those Who Do Not Want to Participate

This is the sentence I wrote in a little notebook of mine with tearful eyes after I heard of my journalist brother being in solitary confinement:

“Have you heard that history is like a train? Some days ago, this train passed over every single nerve knot of my spinal chord. Sometimes you just try not to see it. I change the tv news channel thinking let the train pass, let it go wherever it wants to go. But this time I had an accident with the train. I can no longer say the direction of the train would not affect me.”

It was a certain level of helplessness and hopelessness that I had never experienced before. You have to go through it to know what it is. It’s different from all the bad news that you can hear of. It’s a different type of pain. Somewhere deep down it deals with your whole ideology and perspective towards life.

It’s at that point that you wish there was only one good person that could help you in that system, Only one. You think it could make a difference if only one person would listen to you. The slightest help or hope, the smallest contact would mean the world to you. The smallest, even in that whole big system. Then I started to think that we need more good people to get involved with politics. More intelligent people. More goodhearted. Before I thought politics is all dirt and that I’m beyond that. That politics only belongs to some crazy people who feel shortages in life and then need a stage to star.

Now, many of us already know that Islamic Republic being separated from people is a myth. We know that there is a lot of diversity in the whole social spectrum but somewhere at some point the gravity center of all Iranian people’s level of intellect is in equilibrium with where the government stands. Nobody in this day and age can claim that it’s not. This system could not stay in tact for thirty years in a steady way otherwise. We know we Iranians are no stranger with radical religious concepts, with superstition, with projecting the blames, with women’s rights injustice, looking at the big picture you see where the comfort zones are and that they are quite dominant. With dictatorship, it starts everyday in many Iranian families. Not in the alley. Let’s all take the responsibility. If you are an intellectual, you are more responsible than someone who is not.

Anyhow, the only way is through stepping towards a civil society. Little by little. And all of us. We are all in the same train. We all know from experience that Revloution is not the solution. We know it brings violence and no country ever became democratized through a bloody revolution without having the right base and foundation. We know that a miracle would not happen. We know that civic participation is a major sign of a civil society. We know that very gradually we have to move the gravity center towards what we think is the right side. People have done that before us in other parts of the world. Same way. We don’t even have to reinvent the wheel. This is not an overnight process, and unfortunately there is no quick fix for it. You and I might not get to see the day that we want to see with all the standards, but today all I was thinking of was a new born in a hospital in a city in Iran. He or she might see a better day. An era with tangible differences from now. Let’s start little by little. Let’s make sure nobody is falling behind. Let’s practice participation and tolerance for hearing what we oppose to. Let’s get the dialogue going. Let’s push the gravity center. Even as a symbolic move. Let’s make voting and civic participation a common sense for the next generation to come.

Nameless

There is something in these people’s eyes. A spark of hope and a glimpse of despair and frustration.
There is something in these people’s smiles. A taste of sweetness and a hollow of bitterness from dying dreams.
There is a void somewhere…Something is lost.....
But the beauty is it’s all globally shared. Here and there, without geography.

Whatever it is, it’s nameless.

میگم ما هم نسل عجیبی بودیم. همه مون یه گمشده ای داریم

Mrs. Husseini

Mrs. Husseini was our physical education teacher, when I was in guidance school and later on in high school. Mrs. Husseini went through an accident when I was on third grade of guidance school. I remember she was in coma for several weeks and finally she recovered. But she lost the movement in her legs.

Mrs. Husseini came back to school in a wheelchair. She was still our physical education teacher. She taught us to warm up and how to play ping pong in a wheel chair. She played ping pong with us. Our School principal, Mrs. Haerizadeh insisted that she comes back to work, that she specially teaches physical education. She said, “That is the biggest lesson that girls can learn from her.”

Later on in my life, there were several moments, not the easy ones, that I pictured her in my mind. She playing ping pong, and the fact that she later expected a second child. Her husband that devotedly gave her rides to and from school. And I always felt stronger.

Today, I saw a photo of her in our school reunion back home.

The Atmosphere of Change

The power of a leader or a President is not in the many important decisions that she/he makes, but in “the atmosphere” that she/he creates. Many people in this world are not independent thinkers, so they go by the atmosphere. If the atmosphere stays on long enough, it has the ability to make culture, to become culture, just like art and law do.

So I think what makes Obama, Obama is that he has proved he can create an atmosphere of hope and positiveness. Almost any leader can create atmosphere, but in different ways. Just as Bush successfully created a “bullying” atmosphere in this nation for eight years. That atmosphere can bring about table of values, can set up priorities socially, politically, economically, …in all possible scales and angles.

That’s the main reason I can keep faith in Obama as long as he keeps this atmosphere. Atmosphere then brings change, a very widely spread change, a genuine change, a natural change. As though every single one has been a part of that change. Has actively participated. Not only the president.

The Seventh Year of Transition in Diaspora

There comes another anniversary. And each time/year I look back at it differently. It transcends differently. Today I told a friend I think I made the right decision. There are not too many events in life in which everything shifts in one day. Immigration is one of them. Specially if it happens from East to West.


People look at you and might even think you are born here or raised here with a personal accent, but only you know how you are transiting. Today I can confidently say the transition will never stop once it gets started, will be with you till the very end, the constant process of changing and exploring. In my case the transitions where from East to West, academics to professional and parents’ house to living by oneself all at the same time, in one day. Me being the generation who was born as the revolution was happening and then witnessing an eight-year war, which has no resemblance with what is shown in the media and then going through the aftermaths of war and noncompliant human rights and women’s rights and …. And the immigration which is complicated by itself and makes all of your previous experiences look even more complicated. The first generation transiting usually paves the road for the next generation, whatever remains unpaved has to be taken care of by the next one.


The transition is not a transferable experience, maybe because it’s a very intuitive process in its most parts. It’s a process of constantly questioning everything around you one more time. Without having a given answer, like the ones parents give you when you are very young. You have to find the answers for yourself which is a great growing opportunity. You normally look for a common ground between what you already knew and what you see. There isn’t any most of the time. Sometimes there is. Then you start asking whether this is ”For Me” or “Not for Me” which is again a great self-discovery journey. And teaches you a lot about self responsibility, this time hopefully you can not blame it on any one or system. It’s about you to pick and go. And the best moments are the ones you find an unconventional answer, it’s your discovery moment. It’s great if you could make it a second nature and utilize it for work - ”For This project” or “Not for This Project”
, for life.

Many things you firmly believed in have got to go, without you even being able to believe it, after they create a crisis is when you stop to deny. It’s a constant fall and rise, demolition and reconstruction in a way it has also room to change and/or extend. It’s a challenge of defining boundaries. It’s a challenge of understanding blurry boundaries and being able to work with them. Also of having no boundaries. Defining limits, like a diver determining the dive height. Constantly going back and forth at a certain height, going to the tip of the board, looking down and stepping back until you dive.

Most of the transition process is improvisation. The transition is religious, is personal, is emotional, is professional, is gender specific. It’s about developing a new sense of humor so that people here could laugh at it too, it’s about being able to laugh with them. It’s about being able to have sympathy for matters you were not used to have. That is a significant milestone I guess once you pass it.
It’s about understanding the mindset, without necessarily adapting it in its entire entity.

The transition teaches you something on a daily basis, sometimes hourly, about who you are. And that is why now I think I made the right decision seven years ago to transit.



PS._ This Christmas, I was enjoying my holidays, reading what I like, listening to what I like, sometimes singing along with new year’s songs, word by word, amazed by the fact that seven years ago when I got off the boat, I had no feel for Christmas.