Return

We are dining at a relatively long narrow mahogany table. I’m sitting beside my older brother and opposite my eldest uncle. There are other people at the table, but their faces are a blur to me.

There are three types of food on the table. Both my brother and uncle have cooked. I want to eat my brother’s signature chicken. It looks slightly darker than usual, but it smells as amazing as ever. My brother and I both try his chicken, but despite the usual delicious scent, we realise the chicken is in fact made of paper.

My brother cries quietly. I can feel him shaking next to me, from disappointment, embarrassment, and tears. The chicken that he often gets praised for and loves has failed disastrously. I lick and eat the chickenesque pieces of paper on my plate in a pathetic attempt to reassure him that the meal he’s cooked is delicious. It’s clearly not chicken, but it’s still delicious, it has your magical mixture of spices. I feel so desperate to sooth him I end up patronising him by praising his paper chicken. But he is clever and he can see right through me, so he doesn’t buy any of my bullshit. We are ignoring my uncle who’s trying to diffuse the terrible situation through blunt humour as he often does. I stroke my brother’s shoulders, hold onto his thin waist, begging him to believe that his paper chicken is delicious. That even if it’s not delicious, it’s okay, we can still manage. But nothing seems to soothe him, and this makes me burst in tears too, so I wake up, face wet with tears.

The interpretation is of course too obvious. During this time, I felt I had to defend my older brother’s decision of returning to Iran. Friends and family were shocked, but they weren’t just shocked, they were also judgmental. I found myself irritated by their judgment, but I couldn’t articulate it, so I’m articulating it now: no one is to blame for loving their country, for wanting to live in their own country. Immigration doesn’t feel great, nor does it feel natural. We are allowed to desire our own land. It is not my brother who is to blame. Dare to say whose fault this all is.

Other than this nightmarish dream that haunted me all week, I had a wonderful Reading Week (which means no classes to teach): I read some Hermann Hesse, and worked a bit on my poetry collection, but I happily spent most of my time meeting up with friends and family:

1. I attended the London Fashion Week for the first time in my life as my Iranian model friend put me on the guestlist, and the entire thing pleasantly surprised me. Surprisingly good vibes, great alcohol, stunningly creative looks, hardly any anorexia. London can still fascinate me sometimes, give me pleasure, even hope. (It was also a brilliant opportunity for me to turn myself into a peacock without the fear of standing out.)

2. Two of my close friends were visiting London and took me to a really fancy private club for dinner. Who knew duck and pineapple would make such a divine combination? Who knew even English cuisine can taste good if you inject enough money into it? I had a fabulous time with my good old English friends, and I felt soothed and held by their fleeting yet warm presence in London.

3. One of my new friends came over to meet Princess BluKatsu and we did many hours of Tarot together. She also informed me of the concept of Islamo-gauchisme that they have in France, when I described how stifled I felt whenever I tried to talk about Iran with our fellow academics and writers in the UK.

4. Last but certainly not least I always love hanging out with my younger brother and his lovely wife in West London. I’m so lucky I have some family in London. I know lots of Iranians who don’t have any family in London.

J’adore all my friends, but sometimes I do feel like a treacherous friend myself. These days, they all ask me if I would go back to Iran if the Islamic regime got toppled. And I can’t look into their eyes when I mumble yes. I miss my Iranian university. I tell them. The truth is I don’t just miss my old university, I miss the trees, the treed alleys, the sea, the mountains, the artsy cafés, the delicious restaurants, the friends and relatives I left who can’t leave. Recently, my little brother told me, I don’t think you should go back even after the regime falls, the country will be in chaos then, too. [I have two lovable brothers, but they are very different from one another, for instance, one of them loves and lives in England, the other one chose to live in Iran. I wonder sometimes if my general indecisiveness comes from having been born between two boys, two boys whom I love too much and who love me too much. I think this scenario sounds good from afar if not enviable, but in reality it has caused a lot of confusion in my life.] Anyway, the mess and chaos that my younger brother mentioned is actually one of the reasons I want to go back. Let’s be painfully realistic, of course the Islamic Republic won’t leave without leaving a mess, therefore, I need to go back and clean up their shit. We need to rebuild the country. I could teach literature there, even offer manual labour, rebuild buildings, feed the nation, I don’t know spread kindness and healing vibes somehow, am I being crazy? Maybe, but sometimes, I don’t even know why I’m attempting to build anything here, no wonder it’s all been a ball of precarity, confusion, chaos, and ultimately dissatisfaction – pretty much everything shiny that I have collected in England, I would be happy to throw away for Iran. I am such an ungrateful immigrant, really. My older brother always told me, we weren’t born to be immigrants; we are citizens of our own country.