Memoirs of an Exile
The fact is, whether left undefined or sharply drawn, I identified with his heroes. I, a definite product of my time and place yet on shaky ground, a semi-Jewish, semi-Iranian, modem wannabe from parents with no background, lost in a modern neighborhood of an ancient country, with an ancient first name given because of its modernity, I was of this place, yet was as lost and rootless as the children of slaves generations removed or a deserted dog limping off in the wrong part of town. WHEN THE TIME came, I did not choose between my mother and father,
between motherland and the religion of my fathers, but escaped them all. A spring morning in my teens I boarded a plane and left all that behind, first in the guise of a high school student who would someday return, and later-with my parents divorced and Iran a fundamentalist Islamic Republic, my minimal and shallow familiarity with my religion diminished to an uncomfortable disdain at best-as an immigrant, moving from city to city, from the central U.S. to the West Coast to the East Coast back to the central region, in search of a homeland or perhaps running from the idea of a homeland, and finding that over the years I have created my own culture, my own homeland and family and religion, individualistic, distant, walled-in, a sterile and safe homeland of one. In America, the birthplace of mobility, the home of self-reinvention, as I moved around, I found other mothers and children, other causes, motherlands of others to care about. A latter-day wandering Jew, all motherlands were mine and yet I felt at home in none, save America, and that rarely. I worried about Palestinians for a while. I demonstrated in Los Angeles. In San Diego, I produced powerful posters. These children are dead, one said after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, captioning a playful picture of refugee camp boys and girls. I found other family, other people to save. A working-class girlfriend with an out-of-wedlock five-year-old; a Mormon teenager in Salt Lake City, sexually abused by her father at the age of two; an old Italian man in New York, ve'ry old, who needed someone to feed and to tell stories to, stories about his 1920s youth spent in Monaco playing Baccarat; assorted abandoned and lost cats and dogs and confined and confused rats and chipmunks. I married the daughter of a Mexican warehouse laborer and grilled burgers and hot dogs on the front porch and watched football and Johnny Carson in bed and helped her through law school, and then divorced her. I experimented with names. George to fit in. Jamal as a joke but perhaps also to self-exclude and prove that the world is set against me. I revived Isaac after moving to the South. A long-dead uncle's name, one whom I never met. Jewish but not too much so in my new context. A bit black, a bit Bible Belt Christian. Summer 2005
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