1982 (15 page)

Khomeini was fierce. And he sat on the floor eating and meeting and talking and making revolutionary statements and looking even fiercer. He was always sitting on the floor, that Khomeini. I was never really clear why Muslims were no longer supposed to use chairs. Chairs seemed like too practical an item to suddenly dismiss in the name of religion. Why couldn’t we be Muslim while sitting on chairs? But Khomeini sat on the floor. I assumed that chairs had become an example of the excessive materialism of the West. And Khomeini soon said that contemporary music and university and any kind of modernism were all anti-Islamic, too. He was the new symbol of Iran.

My father originally held high hopes for the 1979 Iranian revolution. He even supported it in the first few weeks, along with workers and women and students and others. It began as a popular revolution that inspired Iranians of all walks of life. My father had previously opposed the shah for his excessive and iron-fisted regime. But the revolution hadn’t turned out the way liberal nationalists like my father expected. Now he would simply shake his head with dismay each night as we watched the evening news from Tehran on CBC.

“The whole world now ees theenking we are savage,” my father would say. “I don’t know why thees must happen like that. It ees, honestly, terreeble.”

It was all very sad. My father grew bitter about the plight of his former homeland. He was outraged that the new regime was executing democratic activists in the name of Islam. But beyond the emotions we experienced inside our home, there were other implications for us, too. After the revolution, I was consistently reminded that my ancestry was somehow
problematic and that North Americans didn’t seem to like Iranians very much. At the Home Hardware store, there was the guy in the baseball cap behind the counter who accused my father of wanting to eat squirrels. And on the radio there was a new version of the old Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann” with the lyrics changed to “Bomb Iran.” That was supposed to be funny. But it didn’t feel funny. Not with my relatives still living in Tehran.

None of my extended family in Iran had long beards or religious robes or any kind of relationship with the new regime. But people seemed to want to bomb them. And by the time I was at Woodland Junior High, kids at school were starting to make jokes about me being a terrorist. They would ask where I was hiding my turban and my machine gun. I wondered what a turban would feel like on my head if I ever got to wear one. I wondered if hair gel would be necessary if I were to regularly wear a turban. Bowie would end up wearing a turban in his video for “Blue Jean” a few years later. But he never looked like Khomeini. His turban was more bohemian than Islamic Republic. And anyway, that video would not come out until 1984.

Of course, even before the revolution I’d been well aware that I had a different lineage than most other kids in Thornhill. But I really didn’t understand the implications or the significance of coming from a Muslim family or having our background. My parents had brought up my sister and me to be quite assimilated in the hopes that we would avoid the difficulty of being singled out. But this only meant I knew less about who or what our ancestry was.

I certainly didn’t know much about organized faith and the
way the world divided itself along religious lines. My parents had told me we were Muslim. I knew that part. But I wasn’t always sure what it meant. I knew my father prayed a few times a day. Sometimes, I watched him as he prayed, and I tried to figure out what he was saying in a whispered tone. And I knew that when we went on long trips, my mother would make us kiss the Koran before we left. But that was pretty much it. That’s what I’d learned about being a Muslim. We never visited a mosque or engaged in any other religious activities. We simply weren’t a very observant family when it came to religion. In fact, we celebrated Christmas and Easter, and I’d learned to say the Lord’s Prayer at school in England. That was the one prayer I had memorized, and it was a Christian one. Later on in high school, most of my closest friends would be Jews. I just had no idea how separated we were all supposed to be.

Sometimes, my ignorance of religion led to some unfortunate confusion. In Grade 5 at Henderson Avenue Public School, Kim Coughlin approached me one afternoon at the end of class with a very serious look on her face. Kim Coughlin had long brown hair and rosy cheeks and was very pretty and a good soccer player. I liked Kim Coughlin but never felt I could talk to her. I was too afraid that she might laugh and that I wouldn’t know if she was laughing at me or not. She was too pretty. When you’re that pretty, you get to laugh at people. And she seemed to laugh a lot. And she was usually surrounded by a few adoring fans.

But on this day, Kim had a very serious look on her face. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood when she walked up to me after class. Her cheeks were rosy. There was little in
the way of any introduction. She just launched right into her query.

“Hi. So … I have a question. Are you Protestant?”

The request landed like a thud on my head. It sounded very important, and I desperately wanted to answer correctly. Kim Coughlin had obviously noticed me and felt the pressing need to sort out some crucial details about my character. I wanted Kim Coughlin to like me. I would have done anything to fit in. But I had no idea what “Protestant” was. It sounded like an attitude or a physical disposition or a cheese. I had no idea. I realized I had a fifty-fifty chance of answering this unexpected quiz correctly.

“No,” I answered, “I’m not.”

I waited for the verdict. I’d made sure not to repeat “Protestant” in my reply to Kim Coughlin. I was still sounding the word out in my head and wasn’t even sure how to say it.

“Oh, okay!” Kim Coughlin replied enthusiastically. “Good!”

Kim Coughlin then skipped away to join her friend who was waiting for her by the classroom door. It seemed I had done well. Mind you, it didn’t mean that Kim Coughlin would spend much more time with me for the rest of Grade 5. But she had nodded and laughed warmly, as if my reply had been the acceptable one. I watched her immediately recount my response to the girl who had been waiting. They looked at me and smiled. It would be years until I properly understood what “Protestant” meant. Until then, I just knew I had answered the question correctly. And whatever it was, I knew I didn’t want to be Protestant. Kim Coughlin didn’t want me to be Protestant.

Then again, by 1980, most people could guess I wasn’t Protestant. Even Kim Coughlin wouldn’t have asked me that question by Grade 7. I had a Middle Eastern look, and now everyone was curious about my ethnicity, especially with world events being the way they were. Maybe it had to do with the size of my nose. My issues were compounded by the size of my nose as I hit my early teens. The sheer real estate of my nose was quite outstanding. My nose had grown disproportionately larger than anything on an average human face. My snoot seemed to develop and mature much faster than the rest of me. By Grade 7, I was a skinny twelve-year-old with the body of a boy but the beak of a man. And it was a significant one. It was an industrial-sized nose. It was a nose that could house its own little factory. And the big beak combined with the brown skin made me look more ethnic. There was no getting around it. Throw in my odd name and the pistachios in my lunch bag, and it was hard to make the case that I was another white kid like my friend Davey Franklin or That Chris from across the street. But my mother kept telling me I was the same as everyone else.

It became increasingly hard to suggest, somehow, that I wasn’t Iranian. But after the revolution it was also hard to tell people that I
was
Iranian. It was a trap. My parents became very quiet about our background in public. This was true of many in the Iranian diaspora. In fact, many Iranians started to call themselves “Persian” to avoid being connected to the backward regime of old bearded men in power in their former homeland. Sometimes, I would use the word “Persian” and I could tell that a person who knew nothing about the cultural origins of Iran would think I had said “Parisian.” Parisian would mean I was
from Paris. I didn’t bother to correct them. I hoped they would think I was French. My first name already sounded French-ish. And it was better to be thought to have come from France than from Iran. And, technically, they’d decided that without me having to lie. My desire for denial ran deep.

Sometimes, I would even hurt the feelings of others to save myself from ridicule. There was another kid in my grade named Ebrahim. He was a Muslim from Africa. We were friends, but I distanced myself from him when people asked if we had the same religious background. He had darker skin and sometimes got teased. I would abandon him to protect my own interests. It was shameful. But I lived with the hope that no one would find out I was Iranian.

My family collectively got its Canadian citizenship in a sweet ceremony in 1978. We had all studied hard and we’d aced the questions. It was a great day for us. My father was now able to tell people he was Canadian. He would thereafter maintain a tremendous pride in choosing to live in Canada and called himself a proud Canadian citizen. But there was no mistaking that he was an immigrant with an accent that originated somewhere else. And no matter how hard they tried, my parents couldn’t will me to look whiter than I was.

Here’s the thing you need to know about Iranians. Many Iranians like to think they’re white. This is because some of them are. Or at least, they’re almost white. And they certainly fancy themselves that way. And to be technically correct, Persians are actually members of the Aryan race. They are not Semites. You may be surprised to learn that I come from an Aryan race. Stop laughing. It’s the truth. As you know, “Aryan” usually implies “white” in the popular imagination.

And Iranians like that. That’s why Persians will often make a point of identifying themselves this way. “No, leesen, you know … vee are not Arab … vee are Auree-an,” some will say. You will hear some Persians saying this, or something like it. They will insist on telling you they are Aryan. There’s even a popular music group in Iran named Arian. That’s Aryan spelled slightly differently, in case you didn’t catch it. And on top of that, Persians have always had a predilection for things Western. In the ’80s, most Iranians loved the United States and its people. It was a great irony that Iranians were often depicted as anti-Western, because there was so much affection in Iran for the West and interest in the trappings of modern American culture. Being considered white meant being more Western. And middle-class Iranians liked that. But I didn’t know the historical background to all of this in 1982. I didn’t even know what “Aryan” meant. I just knew my mother wanted me to consider myself white.

There’s a problem with Iranians insisting on being considered fair-skinned. The problem is that many Iranians are brown. It’s a nice shade of olive brown for the most part. Some are browner than others. But few are very white. They just want to be. At least, they did back in the 1980s. So, to put this in some context, while most of the world population was going out of its way to bake in the sun and become browner in the ’80s, Iranians wanted to be whiter. This was always an issue for me at home. My friends would aspire to a suntan. They considered a tanned look to be sexy and healthy. Everyone wanted brown skin, unless they were goths or really New Wave or aspiring to be really New Wave. Even my Grade 5 girlfriend, Dana Verner, who had kissed me twice and
then broken up with me, liked to go “tanning.” And that was when she was ten. Some preppy people liked to suntan so much in the ’80s that they started going to salons with electronic caskets that they would lie in so they could become browner. Being brown was so important that people would risk zapping themselves in caskets. But this did not happen amongst the ranks of my family. My mother always wanted me to avoid the sun. She would get very angry if I spent too much time outdoors in the summer.

“Why do you insist on going in the sun like this?
Vah-ee
. You’re going to be black!”

That’s what my mother would say. Often.
Vah-ee
is an alarmist Farsi expression meaning, “Oh, dear!”

I’m not sure if my mother really thought I would become black. I think this was a bit of an exaggeration. I could never really be black. But that’s the way my mother talked sometimes. This was her form of protection-speak. For instance, she said something similar when any member of my family went outside in the winter without a proper heavy coat on. My mother would say, “
Beeroon lokht nar-oh!
” This translates to “Don’t go outside naked!” Again, this statement may appear excessive. It seems odd to accuse a fully clothed human of being naked. But this was my mother’s code for “Put on a winter coat!” And in the same way, when my mother said, “You’re going to be black!” she actually meant, “Don’t get too much of a tan, because then you will be even more brown, and you will stand out more and everyone will know you are ethnic and you will be made fun of and you will be sad, or, more specifically, I will be sad.” My mother was trying to protect me. And she could say a lot in a few words.

Here is a short list (or shortlist) of things my mother did not want me to be in 1982:

noisy