My Ill-Defined Horizons A trip to her parents’ homeland brings up questions of identity for a young Iranian-American woman By Melody Moezzi On the way back from piano lessons one Saturday morning in the back seat of the black Volvo with the only license plate in the state of Ohio which read SHIRAZ, Nobar and I tormented her younger brother, Morad. He was six, and as Nobar and I had just recently hit the double digits, we felt it our duty to torture him in the same way that our older siblings, Salman and Romana, had tortured us. Salman, Nobar’s older brother, sat shotgun while his mother, Aunty Negar to me, drove. Getting bored with trying to convince Morad that he was adopted and his real parents were from the planet Zeflubon, we turned our attention to our stomachs. “Mom, can we go to Bill’s?” Nobar asked, referring to the local donut shop. For a moment, Aunty Negar stopped lecturing Salman and looked up at our reflections in the rear view mirror. She responded in Farsi, “Is my name Debbie? Are my eyes blue? Is my hair blond?” No one answered. “Then why are you talking to me in English?” My name isn’t Debbie either. But unlike Aunty Negar, I grew up surrounded by Debbies. I was born the year of the revolution. In 1979, Iran lost all American backing and imperial influence, and she re-emerged as the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the early spring of that year, I was born in Chicago, worlds away from the revolution. I grew up in Ohio and started my education at St. Rita’s parochial school in Dayton. Every Wednesday, my first grade class attended Catholic Mass. Kneeling in the back of the church, dipping my hand in the holy water, I would make the sign of the cross, always repeating in my head, “left shoulder first, left shoulder first.” I fully expected the entire church to collapse overhead if I ever crossed right shoulder first. During Mass, I imagined what the other kids thought of me, sitting in their church and mouthing the words to their prayers. Particularly, I imagined what Shana thought. Shana was my best friend at St. Rita’s. She had long straight blond hair, glasses and freckles. She had been to my house; she had heard my parents’ accents; she had seen the pendant hanging around my neck which read “Allah” in Arabic letters, and I had told her what it meant. _____________________ Unlike Aunty Negar, I grew up surrounded by Debbies. _____________________ Though I always sat with Shana at Mass and paid just as little attention as she did, I imagined that she saw me as a trespasser. At St. Rita’s, all the girls wore blue plaid jumpers over white collared shirts. Even with the jumper, though, I wasn’t one of them. They were all blond-headed, blue-eyed Debbies to me. The reality of their features didn’t matter; they were all Americans. But I was born in America; I watched the same Saturday morning cartoons as they did; I ate the same cereal. Indeed, I thought, this alone should make me the same as them. Yet until I returned to Iran, I never felt like one of them. The digital map on the screen inside the 747 showed a tiny airplane hovering over a dot labeled Tehran. After traveling for three days straight, sometimes not even knowing what country I was in, all I wanted at that point was to see the tiny plane on the screen sit on top of that dot. As the plane landed, my mother handed me a colorful silk scarf with tiny fish on it. I put it on my head tying it loosely around my neck. It was around 1:30 a.m. when we stepped off that plane into the open air of Tehran. I hadn’t returned to Iran since I was three, and at the age of thirteen, I had no clear memories left of it. Nonetheless, the dry sweet smell of the late summer air wasn’t the least bit foreign to me. When I reached the ground after descending the steps of the airplane, I felt it pull me. I felt home. To the many relatives that greeted us at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, however, I was not at home. I was a guest in their country, a visiting American. They gladly went out of their way to make me feel at ease. My family and I attended a party nearly every night we were in Iran. These parties were thrown by different relatives, and all were held specifically in our honor. Our friends and relatives felt the constant need to entertain us, me and my sister in particular. On one of the first evenings after we arrived, Naim, a maternal relative whom I could not pin down in any genealogical tree, had rented out a fancy restaurant in Northern Tehran. They served, among other delicacies, shrimp, caviar and Coca-cola. I sat eating and laughing with my cousins as our host proposed a toast. Cheeks red, smiling, he stood up and raised his glass, “To the Americans, may you go home soon!” he declared in Farsi, laughing uproariously. My mother laughed with him, indicating that we took no offense, and I took a sip of my Coke. _____________________ The fact that I ate Fruit Loops and watched Saved by the Bell after my Saturday morning piano lessons was more than enough to make me American. _____________________ Nearly every day I was in Iran, my cousins and I ate ice cream. We would sit in the ice cream parlor down the street from my grandmother’s house, lick saffron flavored ice cream off of miniature sugar cones, and my cousins would ask me about the US. As they asked me about co-ed schools, Madonna, Metallica and the latest fashions, I realized that to them, my brown skin, my large dark eyes and the matching thick curls on my head would in no way suffice in making me one of them. To them, the fact that I ate Fruit Loops and watched Saved by the Bell after my Saturday morning piano lessons was more than enough to make me American. Returning from another trip to Iran when I was sixteen, my father brought back a Persian rug, which had been in his family for over 100 years. It now sits on the floor of our family room at home. Under one of the corners of the rug lies the faded impression of the old Iranian flag. The only way to gauge the value and quality of a Persian rug is to look at the reverse side and count the number of knots per square inch. The more knots, the greater the value and the better the quality. The customs agent in New York did not know that my father’s rug had 3,600 knots per square inch, nor did he care what those knots meant. He refused to let us take the rug into America, and my father protested. The customs agent looked at Romana and me as though he couldn’t understand our father. My father spoke with an accent, but his English was clear and perfectly understandable; he had lived in the US for over thirty years by that point. “Sir,” the customs agent addressed my father in an unmistakably condescending tone, “we only allowed people to bring these types of valuables back from Iran over a certain fixed time period directly after the revolution. That time period has long since past. It’s too late.” My father continued to protest. The customs agent looked again at my sister and myself, as if expecting us to explain the rules to our own father. We remained silent; we knew he understood the rules better than we ever could. My father spoke again, “If only I had known, I…” “Listen,” the customs agent interrupted, almost shouting, “if you wanted to keep the rug, you should have stayed in your own country.” The second after the customs agent said this, my father asked to speak with his supervisor. This alone was enough to persuade the American man to change his mind. To him, we were not worth the trouble. _____________________ No number of rugs or pistachios can satisfy my craving for memories of a land and a past that died long ago. _____________________ Only recently did the US release CIA documents formally conceding that almost half a century ago it staged the coup which overthrew the incredibly popular Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosadegh, in order to bring the “US-backed” Shah into power in Iran. Accordingly, America’s Secretary of State at the time, Madeline Albright, provided an “apology” to Iran and lifted sanctions on Persian rugs and pistachios. Unfortunately, however, no number of rugs or pistachios can satisfy my craving for memories of a land and a past that died long ago. Here, the words of the customs agent ring true: It is too late. I genuinely detest airplanes, airports and flying in general, but somehow the long transatlantic trips going to and returning from Iran fail to disturb me in the slightest. I almost enjoy them—no matter how turbulent. From a plane over the middle of the Atlantic, with no land in sight, the ocean is clear enough to accurately reflect the sky from time to time, or the sky is clear enough to accurately reflect the ocean. I can't tell which. I find myself suspended between two azure mirrors, and as I peer ahead to see where they met, I am mesmerized. They never seem to converge at a single line in space like you expect them to. They simply fade into one another, and I cannot help but fix my gaze upon where the horizon ought to be, thinking maybe if I look hard enough, one day I’ll see it and know its secret. Melody Moezzi is the author of the nonfiction book “War on Error” about the lives of young Muslim Americans, excerpts of which have been published in Urban Mozaik as well as Parabola Magazine.  She is currently in between publishers and welcoming offers. Her website is www.melodymoezzi.com, and her email is melody@melodymoezzi.com. This website: Copyright © 2006 Dream World Media, LLC. / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.