M asks if I like America.
“The last time I saw you, you were doubtful about America,” she says genuinely.
“Was I?”
It’s been a long time since anyone’s asked me how I feel about America. Six years ago, I was still doubtful, still debating where to call home. Then, I decided, why not have two homes? Why not love both, but prefer one to the other?
“Yes. I am happy in America.”
M says that after a while, the other land becomes your home, your vatan, your land. Paris is her home now; Iran is just a hope, an image she’s been holding onto ever since she fled.
Many people fled for their lives after the revolution. They took refuge in Europe and unpacked their small belongings in hopes of survival. Some moved on, built new lives, put the past behind them. Others like M, waited. Waited for a miracle, an end to brutality, an end to dictatorship and fascism.
She is still waiting, her eyes getting weaker, older. And I wonder if she’ll ever realize that what she left behind is part of a past that none us will ever see again. No matter what you do, you can’t hide the blood, the stains on the walls. You can’t bring back the dead; you can’t free the innocents. Once you leave, you no longer feel what the people feel. You have to move on, otherwise you are wasting your time. You don’t have the right to talk about the mess that you helped create. You don’t have the right to feel pity on the ones who had to stay. You left, so stop pretending you know what’s right and what isn’t. You left, so don’t sit here with your tea and talk politics.
But that’s what all of them do. They sit, talk, their kids completely ignorant of the history of their birth place. They talk about this and that, who’s in jail, who’s out, who was hung, who went on a strike. And then they throw in a joke, laugh, and talk about how rainy and nasty it’s gotten. It makes me sick, listening to them rambling about a damn revolution that happened so long ago.