MY LIMINAL IRAN

On journeying through freedom

Helya Salarvand

My mother met the man who’d help us come to the States on an internet chat site for atheists. She spent months talking to a stranger and disclosing the most intimate details of our life: my father’s abuse, his drug habits, his refusal to allow for divorce, our legal identity and information. He took it upon himself to help us out, finding a lawyer who accepted our case. My mother temporarily left Iran for the States for the first time, without us, in an attempt to ignite our eventual permanent immigration. For four months, my sister and I were left with my father. Most of the memories I had of

Iran from my childhood were of these months. Though I rarely have nightmares, the few I’ve had took this shape.

When my mother returned, she began to plan a flight so cinematic, almost as if made for the movies. This was my way of coping as a child: pretending our move was an Oscar-nominated journey. It is no coincidence that I am pursuing acting now.

I use the word flight deliberately. My father didn’t know that we’d be moving to the States as he’d never allow for it if he were aware. My mother convinced him that she would take my sister and I to America in order to get some sort of residency status that would allow us to return for college, as we had heard the most privileged Iranians do. Before we left, my mother started a new job, bought a new car, and started a home renovation project in an attempt to ease my father’s anxieties and assured him we’d be returning.

I recently asked my mother if she revealed to me at that time that our move wouldn’t be temporary. She said it was a secret from everyone, including me, though I have a distinct memory of knowing. During one of my father’s tirades, I recall sitting on the kitchen counter, asking my mother when we were leaving.

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The first few years of my life in the United States were a blur. I left Iran after my first month of first grade and attended the last three months in the States without having to repeat the grade. My mother tells me I would go to class, put my head down, and sleep. Though I spoke no English when I arrived, within those three months I had somehow managed to pick up most of the language because I remember having a conversation with my first-grade teacher on the last day of school. She told my mother how impressed she was by my improvement.

I was raised in Woodland Hills, or what they called the poor man’s Beverly Hills. The San Fernando Valley has changed significantly since 2004, but when I arrived, it was a space carved out by Iranians and Jewish people who could not afford West Los Angeles. There was a brief period after we first arrived where my mom married the man she had met on that chat site for atheists. He supported us financially for about four years, but when they divorced, my mother, sister, and I moved into a one-bedroom condo in a complex named Versailles. We ended up at Versailles because it was the cheaper sister apartment to our previous condo. Our lease was not up and paying to break the contract was not an option, so the management company of our previous apartment directed us four miles north to Versailles. Within the first few months of our stay, my bike and roller skates were stolen from our ground floor balcony.

I can laugh about the irony of a shitty apartment with such a palatial name. I was the only one of my Iranian friends on food stamps, but the other families I knew still lived in the same shitty condos we did.

I owe my current financial literacy to the fact that my mother never kept our financial stressors from me. As a child I knew that Menchie’s frozen yogurt was a privilege and a treat, and that every ounce of sour gummy worm topping would come out of my mother’s bank account, not our EBT. Like many families, immigrants and nonimmigrants alike, if I asked my mother whether we were poor, she’d insist we were lower middle class.

Though my mother’s second divorce was a significant financial setback, I loved living without a man in the house. I was never bothered by the absence of a father. My friends wondered why my sister and I would exclusively refer to our mother by her first name. I had never made note of the oddness in referring to a parent by their name, so I asked my mother. I guess my father had never bothered to refer to my mother by her name whether conscious or unconscious, it robbed my mother of her sense of identity, so, after coming to the States, my mother taught her children to call her by her first name.

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I did not look back to Iran and acknowledge what I had left until I was forced. In 2011, my mother told me that we’d be returning to Iran for a short trip. The news made me feel as if my world, every lie of assimilation I had tried so desperately to maintain, was caving in. I was so furious at my powerlessness in this decision, not knowing that this access to my home, due to its fleeting nature, would be the greatest privilege of my life.

Being embraced by my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and father (who had managed to get a visa to Mexico and meet with us for the first time after our flight two years prior) during my first night in Iran gave me a full-fledged panic attack. The force of remembering home, its strangely comforting and prickly embrace, discovering the roots I had attempted and failed to maim, felt violent after being marked by migration and a relationship to home defined by distance and obscurity. As I cried and hyperventilated in my grandmother’s home, my relatives brought me noon-o-panir (bread and Persian cheese) and rejoiced over our return.

The next morning, I woke up with an alertness I had never experienced before. The clarity was unmatched. This, I knew immediately, was something that happens to your body upon returning to the soil that made you your senses are heightened to an impossible extent. The smell of my home, my Iran, unique as a lover’s scent, revived memories and feelings that I had taken pride in my child-self for successfully suppressing.

My first trip back to Iran aged me. It lent its hand to a personal evolution so rapid I believe it changed the chemical composition of my body.

After 10 days of joy and remembering, it was time to return to the States. I cried at the airport, unable to cope with the fact that I would once again be starting from scratch. Every fabricated piece of identity I had renovated for myself back in America had come undone. I was bare. My father was stopped by an airport security guard who instructed him to make me compose myself.

During our trip back, at the layover in Frankfurt, Germany, I came out to my mother.

Watching protests erupt in every province in Iran over the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, I felt as if I had been here before. My last trip back to Iran in 2018 was more dystopian than the rest. The brutal impact of sanctions was starkly visible as people sold American dollars on the streets, the exchange rate having skyrocketed so high that a dollar bill held some symbolic magic transcending foreign currency. Protests had erupted during my trip and the internet was shut off for the first time, I had no way of contacting my mother back in the States (who has since been unable to return to Iran).

My sister and I entertained ourselves by creating shadow puppets in our shared bedroom at my grandma’s house. I remember feeling as if I were living in a literal pressure cooker the same one my family would use to make ab goosht (Persian lamb stew). As I walked down the street, I would peer into the faces of passersby in an attempt to gauge whether they felt it too, or if I was just tripping. There was a threshold approaching.

While images of Iranian women removing and burning their headscarves permeate online imagery of the current protests, I caught many glimpses of similar moments in 2018. Women would let their headscarves fall to their shoulders, which encouraged me to do the same. One of the most interesting things I noted from this last trip was the visibility of queerness, which I had so desperately searched for during each of my visits. The same visual signifiers of queer identity in the States like certain colorful dyed hair, certain short hair, certain piercings and tattoos, and all manners of androgyny were not just discernable but obvious amongst Gen Z.

During my last week in Iran, I desperately downloaded Tinder in hopes of connecting with queer women in Tehran. It led me nowhere.

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In January 2020, I repetitively pictured myself on flight PS752. I had been there before. The chaos of navigating Imam Khomeini Airport and the bittersweet relief of takeoff is so palpable to me. I compulsively replayed the scenario in my head: I make it onto the plane. I sit in anticipation until we take off. I take off my headscarf. I settle into a guilty sense of comfort and ease. For months I obsessed over how the passengers of PS752 might have felt, realizing mere minutes after takeoff that they’d never reach their destination. The lucky ones become the most unlucky. Bombed by their own government, midair.

The epitome of Iranian migrant existence is the perpetual state of liminality as our relationship to the physical space of home is convoluted by confusion and contradiction. Whether it be war, exile, politics, finances, violence, or some other force that pushes one to part from their home, the contested state of reliable physical home space is impossible to disregard. The liminal nature of movement is precisely what grants the conditions for the construction of home: where physical place is undependable, the liminality of movement is stabilized as a mode of dwelling. The tragic, gut-wrenching symbolism of PS752 is not lost on me. From PS752 shot down by Iran to Iran Air Flight 655 shot down by the US Navy, Iranians die in the most Iranian way possible. The airplane, as a liminal space, becomes a site of simultaneous hope and death. Iran and the United States, tied in their game of tug-of-war, remain sites of hope and death.

I am haunted by the writings of one of the passengers of PS752: “Behind me, behind me. I’m scared for the people behind me.”

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When I caught wind of the protests in response to Jina (Mahsa) Amini’s death, I asked my mother if she thinks things will be different. We have been here before, she more than I, as the 1979 revolution characterized the entirety of her childhood. How do you know when it’s happening? What are the signs? At what point is there no turning back? I am stunned by my mother’s recent shift from using the word “protest” to “revolution” in describing these events.

I have found it challenging to remain tethered. There is much division within the Iranian diaspora as we all have varying levels of stake in our home country. Our traumas take different shapes, and the wealthiest often take up the most space. I attended the Los Angeles protest linked with the Global Day of Action for Iran. I witnessed countless Pahlavi signs and flags, Shirin Neshat marching in her heels, and a white woman boldly exclaiming, “I wish I could march down the streets of Iran in a see-through burqa and be shot!” When we reached city hall, famous artists and activists like Googoosh and Masih Alinejad took to the stage.

I think of Kurdish Iranians, whose phrase “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” / “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” / “Women, Life, Freedom” has defined this movement. We so desperately lacked their voices on that day. I think of queer Iranians like Zahra Seddiqi Hamedani and Elham Choubdar who sit facing the death penalty. Does Googoosh think of them too? In a video Zahra filmed before her arrest, she states, “I am journeying toward freedom now … If I don't make it, I will have given my life for this cause.”

Is Googoosh kept up at night by the heaviness of these words?

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Countless times I have walked down the streets of Los Angeles exclaiming, “It smells like Iran!” It’s the scent of charcoal and burnt rubber that takes me back to Tehran maybe not as glamorous as one may hope, but certainly transporting. Echo Park at dusk is Iran to me as the park and its lit-up swan boats draw families, lovers, and groups of youths in summer evenings. Afternoon heat in Iran is far too potent, so we’d usually venture to the parks or city squares in the evening. Darkness provides a sense of security as young lovers are shrouded in its anonymity. Moments like this, I breathe deep and squint, imagining this was Iran, embracing the predicament of our liminality.