AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DEBUT WRITER
8. PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST WITH A CRAZY NAME, AND ALSO CRAZY HAIR There is the issue of my name, of course. To everyone who is not Dr. or Mrs. Khakpour, it is insurmountable—the ultimate hyperethnic polysyllabic foreign name, even foreign to “my people,” who rarely recognize its Zoroastrian origin, the name of Zaratushtra’s daughter: Pourucista. My last name is the same as a famous Iranian soccer player—Mohammed, no relation—so people can handle it. It means of the earth, literally dirt-full. No one can say it, and I even say it differently, depending on the person. In Farsi, it is best uttered in a low purr: Poe-roh-chis-TAWH KHAK-pur. (Americans—unless they speak Hebrew—are often disappointed to find out this is indeed the guttural kh, requiring more gut than a German ich.) My name is such a mess of issues that it has been swept under the Iranian-American carpet, over and over and over, until I have forgotten it’s there. Until publication season, that is. Then I start really hearing and seeing my own name again. It
bends into its old bizarre forms: Porchista, Prochista, Parochista, Kahkpour, Kkakpour, Khapour, plus some I have never heard. People make fun of it like they did in elementary school; my book party gets linked on Gawker, and one of the first comments is the easiest: “Khakpour. I made that sound this morning before my first cigarette and coughed up last night’s tequila binge.” Two months later, I go to a literary party in New York, and Gawker takes a shot of me drunkenly smiling. A commentator refers to me as “that Barista Kockpour.” Nancy’s Baby Names, a website created by a Harvard grad “to provide helpful, entertaining information to expectant parents,” includes me in her list of “some unusual real names for the weekend.” I appear alongside literary critic Cleanth Brooks, British archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, diplomat Spruille Braden, and 16th-century Dutch Haarlem governor Wigbolt Ripperda, as“Porochista Khakpour, Iranian-American writer”—the only living unusual namer. Before my NPR interview, Kurt Andersen asks me how to pronounce my name, and I tell him. When we’re on the air, he does the opposite of those who fumble it, who say it quietly and quickly, almost under their breath, like a bad thought they want to go away soon. He belts it! My first name is on target—go, Kurt, go!—but my last name is KHHHHAWK-por, which exactly rhymes with, say, “rock whore.” Katherine Lanpher, the fill-in host of the Leonard Lopate Show, turns it into the MexiMinneapolitan “Poew-rrrow-chista Khakpowr.” An Iranian Voice of America anchor, meanwhile, nails the last name but turns the first into Prochesta, a pronunciation that Iranians sadly seem to favor.
15 KHAKPOUR
the universe, not just to being a novelist. I suddenly don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Weeks later, I discover during another bad moment—as the value of the dollar plummets and oil is sky-high—that gold is at its peak value. I sell what is left of family heirlooms to an old Iranian man in the Diamond District, who listens to a fraction of my story, gives me a decent deal, and tells me, “My boy in medical university; my girl, married and with baby. Your fault for being a starver of an artist, daughter.”