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Diaspora for us Iranian mean living all over the place.

We Iranians live all over the world now. Our lives are influenced by this diaspora, this dispersion of our people, our language, our culture, to which we have all become accustomed.

This new style of life has changed our world views forever. In the good old years, families and particularly mothers, made a big deal when a daughter or son would attend university in a city other than the home city; it was considered to be too far. If a girl were to marry a man from another town, it too was a big deal. Mothers used to say, “we do not give our daughters to ‘strangers.’” Life in gorbat, or diaspora, was considered to be damaging and dangerous. Our ancestors used to say gorbat is hard.

We called it going to a ‘stranger’s’ city or garibeha, which was the unknown life for us. The Iranian literature has the schema of how gorbat is bad for you and kills you. Rumi, Hafez, Saadi, and our contemporary poets use this topic of gorbat, which is an embodied experience and a hard reality for many families and individuals today.

It is interesting that, no matter where we live, we always refer to the host country’s citizens as ‘strangers’ or ‘foreigners.’ These are the terms we’ve kept from the time when going to strange countries was almost unknown, and the Europeans or Americans coming to our home country were coming from ‘outside’ so they were ‘foreigners.’ Now we are the one who are ‘foreigners’ in the countries in which we have chosen to live or in which we have been given the opportunity to live.

Maybe this is the reason for our ability to adjust very quickly to the societies we enter. We can almost immediately refer to ourselves as ‘we’ and to the others as ‘foreigners’; others meaning people from outside of our new geographical and also psychological borders!

The positive aspects of this diaspora are how we have learned about various cultures all over the world.

Diaspora refers to any group of people who is forced to leave its home country. People from the Middle Eastern regions are a good example here. People from these areas all have been forced to experience the bitter taste of migration when no other options have been offered. And yet, many families choose to migrate because of the unstable socio-political situations in their home countries.

In almost every Middle Eastern family you will find members living in at least four or five different countries: a mother here in Canada, a son in Denmark, grandparents here and children in the States, an aunt in Germany and an uncle in England, one cousin in Sweden and another in France. It is interesting to see the family interactions when they live in different parts of the world. Some ‘prefer’ not to teach their children their mother language. They will discover that their children will find it difficult to interact with cousins who know persian or other languages.

It is time for us to write and document the multifaceted experiences of this diaspora. Our next generations will have a hard time understanding why this happened and may not discover how to resolve the identity crisis if we don’t.

What is your experience like?

May 31, 2007
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Democracy, what does it mean? How does it look like? When are we going to attain that?

What do we really know about democracy?

When my daughter was five years old, she attended a kindergarten in Stockholm. One day, in middle of the day, I arrived at the school to take her out to some activity. I noticed that some of her classmates were sitting in a circle and that the teacher was sitting with other classmates within that circle. The topic of the day was Democracy and they were taking turns talking about things that were related to their daily activities and relationships. Once the class was over, I asked the teacher what was going on. She said, “We are just practicing democracy.”

Wow!

I was stunned. I was also excited to know that my daughter was learning about things I’d never, ever heard of in my childhood.

I remember back in Tehran, around age 14 or 15, I was reading a book where the word democracy was used somewhere (I guess by accident or because of translation errors). I took the book to school thinking that my teacher, who was a very educated gentleman, would know about this word, and I expected it to relate to science or biology or math! When I asked my teacher about “democracy,” his face turned red and he advised me to forget about that word!

I could not forget. I went home and asked my father, hoping that he would help. He did not give me the answer either, but he thought that since this word did not relate to our lives in anyway, why learn it?!

Now, looking back on the life changing events that resulted in this Diaspora of Iranians it is fair to say that what is still happening is due to the lack of tolerance and acceptance for various perspectives and world views.

Still, today, we try to raise our voices to get our words heard!

Democracy and love for others goes hand in hand.

Democracy and respect for others is interconnected.

We were never taught how to listen to each other. Our Iranian culture has never even come close to this notion of letting others win! We were never educated about the simplest thing in the world: human relations. Let’s try it now! It is never too late!

What are your experiences with this topic? Share it with others! Share it with us!

May 30, 2007
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Stories is part of our daily lives. All of us.

Remember those old good days? We would hear the stories of Princes and Princesses from our grandparents…

I remember many summer nights when the heat of Tehran was cooling down and our beds were offering a resting place from the daily childhood games and the plays outside on the street. Oh, how many games I can recall: leiley, tanab, keshbazi, these are just a few.

My grandmother would try to quiet us and make us go to sleep sooner, so our pleas for a gesehe or story would be met with a ”khob, bashe” or a hesitant “Okay,” on the condition we lie down in our beds and not to say a word!

There were only three of us children in our home with me being the eldest. I would use my authority to get my siblings to listen while they were giggling!

The story of the kind, generous, and beautiful Princess who would go out and find the world without falling for her status or name, would always amaze me. This Princess would go and sit with people living in faraway places and just enjoy the sharing of little food yet much happiness!

I wonder what my children will tell their children about the stories they heard from us, we being caught in the sorrow of migration, drawn in ourselves, with the guilt of having left our parents behind, and the nightly tears for missing home! I’m not sure about myself, yet I am sure that I have at least tried to keep a happy face and present a hopeful life for my children who were growing up away from our real home.

How about you? What stories have you told your children? Share them with us.

May 27, 2007

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