“Happiness is this,” I thought, tentatively at first, but it became clear as we spun around faster and faster. Absolutely clear. Afraid that the moment would pass, I was trying hard to hold on to it, to memorize the feeling of my mouth smiling wide and wildly, my hands gripping my father’s shoulders. He is young, he is standing tall and I don’t know how or why I hopped on his back as we are ran away from or towards something. I couldn’t have known that it wasn’t the passage of the moment, but rather waking up from the dream, that threatened with sudden annihilation of my proclaimed happiness.
I have many dreams like this in which I spend time with my family, those living and the ones dead. They’re almost always set in Iran, almost always in my grandparents’ old house or in some sort of a garden, a backyard, an alley. I stopped telling people, friends, or lovers I wake up next to, about them. They started a long time ago when I first moved to Toronto, signifying of course how I missed home and prompting daily countdowns to the next trip back. But now when I wake up from one of these dreams or nightmares, there is a terror in my throat. The terror of the uncertainty of return and more importantly, the question of how many family members will still be alive when/if I do.
These types of thoughts are like waiting in line for decapitation and not knowing how long the row stretches. They’re made from the same fabric of mindset that prisoners have – except that it’s called exile. A word I’ve refused to acknowledge, say out load, or use self-referentially, and one that correlates with nostalgia: another intellectually unpopular term. Last week, the queen of Iran’s pop music along with (arguably) its king, released a song called Nostalgia. I probably won’t listen to it because a) not my type of music b) I don’t feel like crying. Googoosh the queen, the beautiful child-star-singer-diva now living in some American city, had a fall from grace as painful and swift as many of the tragic movie plots she had a role in before 1979. Ebi’s fate was the same, similar to hundreds of people who fled the country during or after the Islamic revolution with no chance of going back. Some were abruptly exiled, others subtly preoccupied with assimilating in their new homeland while rarely really doing so. And here we are, all of us, clenching photo albums and heirlooms, sharing grainy videos and false hopes.
When I spoke to Amir Naderi, having the pleasure of an evening tea with him in New York City, he said nostalgia is for losers. It means nothing, he announced. It’s just a trick of memory, stifling growth. I agreed, nodded, smiled with an earnestly approving gaze. But we both agreed, I think, on the lie we were telling ourselves to not feel the pain.
Sometimes it’s pain, sometimes mere confusion. An assortment of longing, anger, criticism, and protection. We are Iranians (or better yet, Persians), and hate it when other people hate us but love to hate ourselves; self-adoration and self-loathing in volatile degrees depending on the political climate or how close Norouz (the Persian new year) is. This indignation towards ‘us Iranians’ is one of the most prominently unifying factors among the ones I know, at least in the diaspora. And the resentment is inevitably redirected at another group of fellow-Iranians seemingly responsible for the current situation and its hapless trajectory.
I’m in no mood to analyze this any further so I hope it makes sense so far, and I’m sure there are any number of academics in different ‘Exile and Diasporic Studies’ or ‘Middle East Studies’ or ‘Iranian Studies’ departments around the world that have covered this glaring collective sentiment from a million angles. As far as I’m concerned, one of these professors should be my therapist when I go looking for one.
And I need therapy because I know all of this must be fucking with my head, anyone’s head. I’m constantly battling the idea of home and family and language and nationalism and my purpose or rights where I live, how I live. Here’s my passport with 10s of stamps and—
[At the table across from me, there is an vile mother of a beautiful two-year-old screaming with her coarse, smoky voice at the little girl while the rest of the family carry on eating. I know kids can be annoying and I feel it for the parents but this is abusive. She keeps pushing her around and I hear her yelling: “you’re gonna be an alcoholic!” and the girl repeats “I’m gonna be an alcoholic” in her cute, squishy voice. If kidnapping wasn’t a crime, I would. Also, reading/watching this horrifying incident online, I wonder when it’s necessary to call authorities while witnessing bad parenting, and when it’s just creepy.]
—Happiness. I’m good at it sometimes. I’m good at finding it, or recognizing when it hits me: even some nice, thick Turkish coffee can exude hours of happiness if you do it in the right cup, and expose your face to the right amount of sunlight falling through the window. Take a long walk, a different path, meet a stranger, drop by a yoga class, overspend on something you like. There: Happy. But then it leaves me and if I allow my mind to wander in the directions it’s not supposed to, picking memories apart and washing off optimism from perilously sensitive decisions, then I’m lost. I get lost like Alice and forget there was ever a rabbit or a garden. I’m purged of reasons why. Why be here, why write, why do anything…
And here’s the critical moment, when you need remembrance of happiness. Of how it feels. The simple law of cause and effect: you find or stimulate the cause that enables the effect of happiness, then sit back and hope for the best. Like taking drugs, you put yourself in the mercy of a crafted situation, an unpredictable foray, demanding joyous adventures. Happiness is when it works.