116/365

childhood is the bleary undone (dream)
you glance at through bewildered rheumy (eyes.)
incoherent recollections whispered like (prayers)
in the fog of precarious (memories.)
faded photographs locked in the (closet)
with the threadbare (stories)
you play on repeat like a favorite (record)

the first house i remember living in
is a house i don’t think we lived in.
it’s my mothers childhood home.
it’s in tehran.
it’s october
it’s nineteen seventy eight
i am four and tiny like a rag doll
the nation is about to be awash
in the young blood of revolution:
a fire at the cinema rex
were four men doused the building
with airplane fuel before setting it alight,
would spark generational anarchy.
it was all the talk in our house,
i assume.

i don’t remember all the rooms
it was small and packed with people—

(To be continued…)

86/365

i knew from a young age
never to trust the american government.

blame it on an idealistic father
poking holes in a capitalist system
to which he brought me,
only to be made to feel shame for needing to assimilate.

blame it on witnessing the blowback
effects of a failed coup in 1953
on the streets of tehran, at the age of four.

blame it on knowing who to be
in the games of cowboys and indians,
blacks and whites
haves and have nots.

in third grade,
i refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance
because under god felt like a threat.

i knew from a young age
never to trust the american government.
and it has not done one thing since
to change my mind.

Education. Book. Knowledge. Words.

It’s late and I am in Jakarta. My brain is fried. Reading too much. Thinking to much. Discussing too much. Feeling too much. I have people emailing me thanking me for my thoughts, while an old friend said I am being toxic. I am having fifteen conversations my head every hour and thinking of twenty different things to write. This level of analysis is not sustainable.

I read one article that clearly resonates with me and articulates my dread perfectly. Then the very next one makes me doubt what I just agreed with. I am weighed down by guilt and sadness and anger. And exhaustion.

The next four years will be taxing, but we don’t have to figure it all now. Whether we listen or protest. Fight or try to understand. All of these things will work themselves out. We are human beings on our road to evolution and this election like all human events is but one speck in the grand scheme of things.

I am not giving in or giving up. Just saying that after a few days of watching swastikas painted on walls, or being called smug because I am educated, or being told that I should fight harder or cry softer or just accept it or never give up has got me spinning.

I have nothing intelligent or profound to say, other than we need to take care of ourselves first before we can help others. I am going to crawl into this giant hotel bed and get some rest, because tomorrow I will be working with a group of educators, trying to find ways to make non-fiction reading relevant and powerful for young readers.

I am not sure if these actions will have any effect on American politics, or if we will in anyway get any closer to peace and understanding, but I know that it is my skill set and it is the path I have chosen, so my fight starts tomorrow with the best tool I know of: Education. Book. Knowledge. Words.

Oh and Leonard Cohen….so so much to say. I very much look forward to writing that post when my brain settles.

Our Story

When Ari asked me to read Obama’s book, I hesitantly bought and read Audacity of Hope. It is a lukewarm campaign book, that I actually enjoyed. It is political in nature and written on a level I could understand and appreciate. Although tinted with a personal varnish, it is still a manifesto of sorts, written by a politician climbing a power ladder. It is a face. A poster. Barely authentic. Likable. American.

After I proudly told Ari, that I had read Audacity of Hope, he curtly responded, “Oh really? That was the wrong book. I actually meant that you must read Dreams of My Father.”

I did. He was right. Now I am asking you to please read it too. While Audacity of Hope is a political soul-search of sorts, Dreams of My Father is a search of a different kind. It is the story not of a president, but of a man in search of himself. It is the story of us all. It is the story of our families and the disappointing skeletons we have dressed as ancestral heroes. It is the story of race, nation, and identity. It is the story of humanity.

Written before Obama was a Senator, the book is rough and raw and honest. Beautifully written, it reads like novel full of complex characters and plot twists. Forget everything you think you know about Obama. Forget he is even the president and read this book like you would a work of fiction. No matter your thoughts on Obama the politician, this book is a must read. That is the end of my formal review. The end of my request that you read the book.

I want to spend the next few paragraphs dancing with my own thoughts on one of the themes I found the most compelling: Identity.

I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there.

As a Third Culture Kid, I have spent way too much time trying to find a balance with my hyphen. Iranian-American? Sounds like an oxymoron. Could there be more opposing forces. As a child, newly arrived in the USA in the 1980’s, I felt like a bizarrely sculpted Siamese-twin-- born of two enemies. I spent so much energy defending both sides from each other. I defended Iran from my friends and American from my parents. The pressure of animosity from American culture was compounding: angry-muslim-terrorists? Really? My grandmother is the kindest person I know. Our music is sensual. Our poetry ancient. Our cuisine complex. On the other side, Americans: fat-stupid-lazy-imperialist. Really? Berkley seems petty cool. Have you heard of Bob Dylan? I never knew who to be. It is only recently that I have erased not only the hyphen but the twins as well. You can have American, Iranian all of it.

The constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn’t I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.

Obama also struggled with a murky identity. Born to a white American woman and a Kenyan father, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, Obama spent much of his youth trying to first find out who he was, later to shape that identity.  The irony is that he has very little connection to the African-American community of which he has somehow been painted the symbol.

As Obama, true for me too I suppose, tried to create his identity, he repeatedly grasped for a variety of romantic ropes, lose ends really. First, he created the myth of his father, his grandfather, his tribe, his continent. Everything that was out of reach seemed to be what he needed to complete himself. Every time he leaned on some romantic vision of the very thing that he felt would complete him, he would begin to understand that his father, his grandfather and even Africa were flawed and broken. Just as he was. He is. I am. You are.

A circle was beginning to close, so that I might finally recognize myself as I was, now, in one place.

There is much more to say about this book, but I have seemed to hit a dead end tonight.  I have written enough about Obama lately, so I will close by saying that this book has touched me in a way that few books have. It is an important story that needs to be shared, as it is our story. It is the story of a melding of worlds. It is the story of global citizens and cultural blends. It is the story of our new world.

Hard to Know

Sifting through old posts, it appears I have written quite a bit about Barack Obama on this blog. I have spent the last hour reading old posts, at times feeling proud of my growing body of thoughts on the man, while other times I found myself feeling a bit ashamed for making such rash judgments about him, never having read his books. I am more than half way through Dreams From My Father, (I read and wrote about Audacity of Hope a few months ago) and I find myself torn about Obama and his story.

Before I continue, no matter your political affiliations, might I recommend that you read Dreams From My Father to gain a deeper insight on Obama the man, not the politician. Page after page, I am left in awe of his story, and in a weird way, I have found many similarities to my own struggles, both with politics, but more importantly simply becoming a man. Yes! I am comparing myself to the president of the United States; my ego knows no bounds.

There are many directions this post could take, but I for now, I simply wanted to write about the idea of selling-out. Last night, as I was reading about Obama’s days as a community organizer in Chicago, with goosebumps on my skin, flipping the pages filled with admiration and respect for him, I stopped and said to my wife, “I feel so sorry for him. He is too smart to be the president of the USA.  He is too wise, too kind, too reflective to be a politician. He must be a mess sitting in the White House. Either he has sold out his entire set of values and now deals with the nagging guilt of turning his back on everything he believes in, in order to bow down to his Goldman Sachs sugar daddies, or worse, he sits in the most powerful office in the world impotent and powerless to do the things has worked for his entire life. Either way he would serve the world much better back in Chicago!”

Then I heard Ari’s voice in my head. Speaking about me, “I feel so sorry for him. He is too smart to be the teacher at a private school in Asia.  He is too wise, too kind, too reflective to be a teacher working a corporate school. He must be a mess sitting in his huge house. Either he has sold out his entire set of values and now deals with the nagging guilt of turning his back on everything he believes in, in order to bow down to his corporate sugar daddies, or, worse he sits in the state of the art school impotent and powerless to do the things has worked for his entire life. Either way he would serve the world much better back in the Bronx or Africa!”

"It is hard to know who is selling out and who is doing their best, if that person is not you."

Who am I to sit and judge this man, when I have no idea what stirs his heart? It was much easier to call him a corporate hack, before I read this book, but now that I have, it is much more difficult to understand what he is doing and why.

I know I have justified my move from working on the ground for social justice to a more comfortable situation. We can all justify everything we do and feel fine about it, only to turn around and berate others for doing the exact same thing. It takes an open, critical and objective mind to see yourself in others and others in you.

Perhaps Obama is waiting for his second term to return to his roots. Perhaps he thought that he could do more while compromising with the obstructionist Republicans. Perhaps  I feel that by educating wealthy Asians, I can create a more just and sustainable world. Which one sounds more absurd? You tell me.

The truth is that revolution, while a handy T-shirt slogan, takes a lot of guts and sacrifice. It is easy to sit on the sidelines and cheer and jeer as politicians come up short and disappoint us for not being as revolutionary as we want them to be. But the truth is that the system we want to topple, reform and  change is massive.

I am not sure if writing these little posts and teaching kids about the ills of the market economy, while I myself participate in it whole heartedly, is the way toward this change, but it is the path I have chosen. Who am I to say that Obama has sold out?

All I know for now, is that the man who wrote, Dreams From My Father, has to still be alive somewhere in the White House. You cannot outgrow that kind of passion. He is very different from the man giving the State of Union speeched and sending more troops to Afghanistan,  of that there is no doubt, but something about him has to be the same. I have to believe this to be true, because I know that the pieces of me--the ones that commuted into the Bronx or lived in Africa for two years--are still stirring in me.

More thoughts to come I am sure. But in the meantime, what do you think? How do you deal with the feeling of selling-out?

A New Inferno

A year ago, an election was rigged, young people became enraged, and the streets first turned green then red. Iranians were suddenly the flavor du jour. Support poured in from every direction, #iranelection and green avatars on twitter looked like they could wipe away thirty years of tyranny, ignorance, and brutal religious fervor.


The people chanted from roof tops. The pundits speculated. A history was told and retold. The young and the old stood up to power and demanded freedom. For a second it looked as if Iran woulds finally be free, but just as quickly as it started it ended. The rallies, the fires, the demonstration, the rage all flickered to a lull and eventually disappeared. It is now business as usual, and a year later the world has once again forgotten about Iran.

Our need for freedom has become another “remember when” CNN sound bite. I have word from inside Iran that the mood is still one of disillusionment and disappointment. Once again the cock of the walk struts his stuff, and now the world is responding by imposing fresh sanctions. Iran has regained its place on the axis of evil, and all those freedom fighters and brave young people demanding their freedom a year ago have once again been transformed into an angry mob Middle Easterners.

I just wanted to document that there are voices out here still waiting for the still lingering hot coals to spark and ignite a new inferno.