Silence is an animal with two faces:
| 1. | Voluntary silence Silence to breathe Silence into the labyrinth of the self Silence to cleanse Silence to undo and exorcise Silence, that buffer between bodies |
First born: London, England.
First birthday photo: dressed in a dirndl.
Perched at grandfather’s chest
mommy’s doll is stuffed
into white lacy tights that leave
their impression
on her Michelin Man legs.
Shuttled between Tehran and London
and Hamburg and Sunderland
the toddler is said to have
stopped crying
engrossed when placed in
front of the telly
with Tom Jones
singing and gyrating
his hips.
First momentous memory: possessed
jumping on a spare bed in the cool storage room
chanting, I have a peepee, I have a peepee.
The child’s make-believe world
in her blue bedroom
is a cozy bed encased
in a glossy, kelly green frame
an arcade of dreams
a pilgrim’s boat
its perimeter the frontier
separating shelter
and the vast ocean
of sharks and bogeymen beyond.
The all-night game: all limbs must stay strictly within the frame, or else
the beyond, the savage beyond.
Next door a little brother sleeps, his toy soldiers poised on battlefields.
Mommy dressed me at her closet of wonders and scents in a green polyester costume with flouncy sleeves she had sewn for my role as “leaf” in a kindergarten show. Or so I remembered for decades. Recently, a woman writes me saying she was my elementary school classmate. I try to find her name familiar, convincing myself that I do, as we do with so many fellow countrymen’s names that may or may not belong in our pasts. She mentions our “flower” play in elementary school.
Clank clank clank in Mommy’s heels down the hall when I am home alone…
Breathless from bliss on a tricycle.
Twirling my short pleated skirts
in front of the gramophone,
dancing with wrists bent, hands blooming magnolias.
Mommy makes snacks of steamed fava beans and red beets and turnips on dark winter afternoons.
A groovy, young father’s navy blue BMW 2002 with its bunny wabbit grill.
Velvet and wool blankets heaped over a low table we sat around, a heating unit housed under it, our legs jutting into the heated cubby, a toasty korsi on winter nights of soups and stews and writing between the lines.
Every school textbook opened with full-page headshots of the Shah and Empress Farah.
Sleeping in a girls dormitory for a summer where my bed is once covered end to end in sand, maybe from the beaches of the English Channel nearby, and my dolls are dismembered, and we hear rumors of a savage murder in the woods surrounding the international boarding school, but no one tells my parents back in Tehran and neither do I because I am somehow mute.
Barbie and Sindy dolls and their seasonal wardrobes and tiny plastic high-heeled shoes. Sindy’s lavender royal cape, purchased in Bath, United Kingdom. My love for shades of purple unmistakable even early on.
Riding a glittery gold bicycle on the grounds of the apartment complex around a large swimming pool downstairs from my blue bedroom.
An older, sensible father’s blue Peugeot 504 and its backseat booster seat. A turquoise and elongated ceramic figure, a mysterious seated feline, nestled on the shelves of my father’s office, a sprawling city where I run laps and get eye exams.
Dolphin diving in the pool in my red one-piece suit either holding my nose or wearing a pinkish, flesh-colored nose clip. Marco. Polo. Always with the fear of Jaws. Until dusk when we rush home shuddering, wrapped in our towels, lips blue and teeth chattering.
Too early, it was too early to cry each night into the pillow, too early to have begun fearing my parents’ abandonment of me. The death-fear that enters us at birth and propels us into our actions. Every church thrashing, every sports-arena roar, every holler of joy is to defy, delay the inescapable.
Reciting memorized poetry before the entire class as early as the first grade.
Multi-family trips to orchards in remote villages where one family or another owns land, zameen, in Karaj and other villages around Tehran. I begin to see the ruthless pecking order among
