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July 1, 2007 |
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Persian, English (non-fiction)
Jasmin Darznik
It’s the new language that leads me astray, cuts off my mother tongue and carries me off in a jumble of strange words. “Whisper.” “Marshmallow.” Did I ever have the language for these? Slowly I learn to look at the world backwards, train my eye to move left to right instead of the Persian way around the page. The lines of my first penmanship—lines that flowed down and across every boundary—fall to waste. In their place I trace stocky letters easily contained between dotted lines.
When we first came to America in 1979, my mother always dragged me along on her trips to the grocery store and I’d stand by mutely as she struggled to communicate with Americans. Very soon I could tell that hers was not a fashionable or exotic accent, but rough and ugly to these strangers' ears. One word out of her mouth and Americans would stare her down, hard and long. My mother seemed not to notice or care; if anything she pitied Americans their apparent stupidity. But not me. Whenever my mother spoke English, even a word or a sentence of it, I cringed. I'd inch away from her and quietly disappear behind a rack of clothes or scramble down the next grocery aisle.
Pride, I happen to believe, is not a child’s native instinct. It needs to be taught and learned—and often for good reason. Shame, though, comes very easily to a child and is only very rarely undone by later experience. It can, however, inspire certain abiding talents and affections. Shame took my Persian and gave me English.
In America I might have cleaved myself to Persian, but survival—even the most basic social survival—depended on learning English and learning it fast. But once I mastered the rudiments of reading and writing, English became less a matter of survival than something beginning to resemble love. I began to make my way through stacks and stacks of library books. I polished off essays and began to walk away with all the school literary prizes. And it was here that my problems with Persian really began.
My parents prided themselves on the seeming ease with which I picked up English. In public with Americans, my mother would nudge me and whisper, "Show them how well you can speak! Even better than those Americans!" In time my parents learned to speak English well enough to make their own way in America, but for many, they had me assume the role of the family's official translator and all-purpose intermediary between "us" and "them." At home, though, I could expect nothing but reprimands for speaking "that" language instead of "ours." “Don’t use your big English words on me!” my mother would often warn me as a child.
But while I grew up speaking Persian at home, mine is a diminished and misshapen native tongue, a remnant of all the imposed boundaries of my childhood. The Iranian world that my family and their friends reconstructed here in California was in fact made up of two very different worlds, each with its distinct vocabulary and distinct topics of conversation. Whenever my parents' Iranian friends used to gather for dinner parties, birthday fetes, and Norooz celebrations, invariably the men and women would part ways just as soon as they stepped out of their cars and over the threshold of their host’s home.
As a girl, my place was with the women. For many years I was content to sit among them, silently listening to their talk. Their fancy attire, animated gestures and gossipy conversations fascinated me as a child, and my presence was tolerated so long as I sat quietly and fulfilled my duty of replenishing their plates of food and cups of tea.
Yet with each year that went by in America, I'd cast more of a longing look at the other camp. Emboldened by my little bits of learning, I yearned to join the men in their earnest talk of Iranian politics and Persian literature. But very few women crossed that invisible boundary in those days and in those circles of ours, and it was unthinkable that I, a young girl, should pull up a chair next to grown men. It would have been indecent.
So over the years, my Persian grew up around these women's lives and the particular language they spoke to each other. And my tongue wrapped itself around the role I played at these functions, the forever deferential and soft-spoken daughter.
Now when other Iranians hear how long I have lived abroad, they will tell me how good my Persian still is. But I know the truth: my Persian is oddly and unmistakably stunted. Sure, by force of habit I've learned all the compliments and pleasantries. I speak a colloquial Persian that gets me by remarkably well in most circumstances, but it's far from a high or literary Persian. And in the Persian language that boundary makes a world of difference.
It's a discomfiting tongue on me, this Persian of mine. When I speak it now, even when I take care I hear an infantile version of myself speaking. In Persian I am more bashful, sweet, and polite. Even the tone of my voice is different—it is a far, far softer voice than my voice in English.
In America Persian has been my language of infancy, intimacy, manners, and—perhaps most of all—of boundaries. You can hear it as soon as I open my mouth, which is why as an adult I have so very often preferred silence. For me it's been English for school, work, and Americans, and Persian for home, family, and Iranians. Endearments still sound sweetest to me in Persian, and it's in expressing emotion that I'll most readily surrender to it. Ideas, though, come to my mind and out of my mouth in English.
I remember there once was a distant relative my parents loved to ridicule. One day in America, this relative up and decided he would forget he had ever spoken Persian. Other relatives would taunt him, turning the situation into a sort of contest over who would finally make him break out and speak his native language. But this man held fast. He has never, so far as anyone knows, spoken Persian again.
The truth is that I have also been eager to unburden myself of my native tongue and the world to which it bound me. For me, leaving home and my girlish self has meant long absences from this, my mother tongue. The road away is easy, too easy really—except that curious detours begin to appear far along the way. When recently I started to read Persian poetry in translation my interest was neither benign nor benevolent. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. What was this great legacy of poetry of which every Iranian spoke but only a few seemed to know intimately and well?
The first surprise would be that translation itself was less than transparent and much less than innocent. When I began to read Persian poetry in translation I could hear the muffled voice of that other language, the real language that lay beneath the English translation. That voice kept slowing me down and tripping me up. I thought I could hear some of the original verses quite clearly, and I’d quarrel with the translator over his choice of words. It didn’t matter if I was right. Probably I often wasn’t. The point is that I still had enough Persian left in me for a fight
I'll always speak many languages, but I have grown tired of forked tongues and split selves and mistaken identities. I want to access Iranian worlds that correspond to worlds I know in English. But first I need to suit myself up with a new Persian language. And so, embarrassed, wary, curious, and afraid, I've begun the long process of willing this old language of mine into a new form. I've begun my life in this new old language by dragging out the tattered old language primers from my childhood, the ones with the silly stories and cartoon drawings of school children. I left them behind years ago to reach instead for Keats, Bronte, Woolf and, much later, for volumes of translated Persian poetry. I just might never make it from here to meet Hafez or Farrokhzad in our common language, but at long last I’m working my way in their direction |
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Jasmin Darznik was born in Iran and came to the U.S. at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Her essays, short stories, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, Women’s Review of Books, Alimentum, and other publications. She has received awards and honors from The Iowa Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Marin Arts Council. She is currently at work on a memoir about three generations of her family in Iran and is a doctoral candidate in English at Princeton University. She can be reached at jdarznik@princeton.edu. |
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