By Anise Vance A Work in Progress
The small fictions I play with are often more plausible than my true history. When I am asked “Where are you from?” the conversation that ensues can last hours. I am poked and prodded as if I were a physical specimen of twentieth-century globalization. Sometimes it is just easier to say that I am from Santa Fe.
My father is African American, born and bred in Hartford, Connecticut. He has the thick American accent of a Yankee broadcaster and speaks carefully, precisely, and authoritatively. He dons suits and ties now, but a college photo shows him sporting an Afro, a dashiki, and the wide smile of someone having a good deal of fun. He still wears the large square glasses popular in the 1970s, which somehow suited him, with his graying moustache and bald head. He is deeply intelligent, incredibly hardworking, wonderfully wise, and a devoted father.
Born in Iran, my mother left her home country in her early twenties to study in Boston. She describes her youthful self as a fiery liberal who defied conservative Persian norms and lived life to the fullest. By all accounts, my mom was a heartbreaker; when I was in my teens, I caught snippets of a conversation between her and an old friend about love letters some hapless suitor had penned to her when they were in college. Her voice has the elegant lilt of a poet and traces of Farsi cadences. Watching her work a room is unnerving; she wins people’s affections like the Romans conquered the West. At my mother’s core resides a certain toughness—a trait common among the women in my family—fortified by intelligence and understanding. Wrap that in a whole lot of love, empathy, and creativity, and voilà, you have my mom.
My mother never planned on living in the United States permanently. My dad’s marriage proposal was vague at best: “Would you mind delaying going overseas for a few years?” After a couple of days, when he finally asked her directly to marry him, she replied that she thought she had already said yes. And so it was that the confusion surrounding my family began well before I was born.
My parents’ first stop after college was Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where they arrived with my older sister, an excitable and beautiful baby. Three years later my family was treated to a special delight: I was born, cross-eyed, yellow with jaundice, and troublingly sleepy. I remember nothing of my time in Côte d’Ivoire; we moved when I was one year old to Nairobi, Kenya, where we would spend the next seven years. It was in Kenya that I learned to read, ride a bike, and play sports. We had three dogs—Nero, Meshki, and Heidi—and a basketball hoop. I loved school, loved my friends, and loved coming home to run around with the dogs. I would often beg my sister, whom I worshipped, for the tiniest scrap of affection. Life was blissful, and I knew who I was: a Kenyan.
I was eight when the carpet was pulled out from under me and we moved to Botswana. There I attended British schools that demanded military-like discipline. I was heartbroken at leaving Nairobi. I missed our dogs, my sister was going through a moody puberty, and the upheaval in general left me grumpy. I did find comfort in the friendship of two fellow Iranians. We would play cops and robbers, shouting “Khomeini omahd” (Khomeini has come) at the top of our lungs, and attended Farsi classes on the weekends. We idolized the older Persian boys, with their slick facial hair and off-color jokes, and nurtured crushes on the pretty Iranian girls. I still described myself as Kenyan, but others called me American and “colored,” a term often used in southern Africa to describe people with brown skin. I accepted both identities nonchalantly because they mattered little to me. To my mind I was somewhere between Kenyan and Iranian.
Three years after so abruptly moving to Kenya, my family once again picked up and shipped out. Cairo, Egypt, was to be our last stop in Africa and the city where I would complete middle and high school. On the Cairene streets I discovered that, to many Egyptians, I looked like one of them. Among the first and most necessary words I learned were “Mish aref Arabe” (I don’t understand Arabic). At the international school I attended, I was considered American because I spoke no Arabic, had my father’s thick Yankee accent, and was unacquainted with Egyptian culture. I was, however, also completely unfamiliar with mainstream American norms. I was an outsider to both the Egyptians and the Americans who attended my school. My closest friends shared my outsider status: we were the black kids.
This Thing Called Blackness
In middle school, my best friend was a dark-skinned Egyptian American who readily identified as black. God, how we “black kids” loved race. I remember the nights we spent pretending to be stand-up comedians, using “negro” and “nigger” as punch lines. Like most boys our age, we obsessed over sports and girls while awakening to music and fashion. Predictably, we wore baggy clothing, tried out various neck chains, and drooled over all-white sneakers. Our musical tastes evolved from Nelly’s party hip-hop to the socially conscious work of Mos Def and Talib Kweli (a.k.a. Black Star). Without truly understanding the meaning of the rhymes, I memorized verse after verse. As we moved from mimicking shallow stereotypes to the very beginnings of comprehension, the word “nigger” held a place of particular import. It was something we uttered only around one another and with specific intent. We felt that using it made us part of a world where we weren’t held at arm’s length. We were brothers, and there were legions of us.
“Nigger” became our special code word. It took me years to use it in front of a white person, and I clearly remember the first time I did so:
As the word tumbled out of my mouth, it felt heavy, bloated, and out of place. It was the first and last time I would say the word “nigger” in the presence of a white person, and also the last time I would use it in front of Paul.
Paul arrived in tenth grade, a military kid from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Paul and his brother, Dejuan, quickly became my closest friends. Paul was razor smart and viciously determined. His stern attitude made him both feared and admired. Dejuan, meanwhile, was a jokester who could charm water from a rock. He was rarely seen without a grin and never without a girl. And, yes, my two best friends were black. The three of us happened to be the only black Americans in our class that year.
I felt at home with them, despite our enormous differences. My American family hailed from the North, as Paul and Dejuan would often remind me, while theirs was rooted in the South. They were staunch Christians while I was born into a Baha’i family. Both their parents were black; I was mixed. But in the dog-eat-dog world that is high school, you need people you can trust. We never felt the need to find an army of folk like us, and for me, our friendship was liberating: I no longer needed to rely on black stereotypes—or to use the word that I thought came with that—to belong and to bond. Race may have been the original reason for our friendship, but it was not what kept us friends. We simply liked, believed in, and trusted one another.
When we graduated from high school, Paul and Dejuan enrolled in the Naval Academy, while I was lucky enough to go to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Culture shock does not even begin to describe my first impressions of that school. It was a freakishly foreign land to me. Unlike in the countries of my upbringing, white folk were everywhere at Dartmouth, fraternities and sororities were the major social centers, and no one seemed to know the first thing about hummus or shawarma. I was not alone in my feelings of alienation; in that supposed wonderland of privilege, a lot of young people got lost.
Let us be frank: college is a circus. Groups of friends are shaped and reshaped constantly, people fall in and out of love in a heartbeat, and everyone freaks out when—boom!—four years are quickly up and we discover that we still know next to nothing about ourselves or the world. I am still trying to work out what happened at college.
For starters, I dove into the black community through various campus organizations. I served on our black student union’s executive board and on the Inter-Community Council. I was an advocate for issues affecting the black community and helped found a group for men of color on campus. I wrote my thesis on segregated black populations and spent a good deal of my time railing about inequality. Issues of race were, clearly, at the forefront of my mind. Yet despite the public face I showed on campus, it was in the most private sphere that I took another step forward in understanding my mixed identity.
During my junior year I took a course on interracial intimacy. During a discussion on the relevance of mixed-race interactions to racial progress, one young woman remarked, “The key question is who is in your bed.” She was making a simple point: intimacy, which is not synonymous with sex, is the final test of prejudice. Many students in the class shifted uncomfortably. I was involved with black and nonblack women during college. My two most serious relationships were with a white woman, Mary, and a Native American woman, Annette. Mary once repeated a joke that included the word “nigger.” We both froze for a second and then moved forward as if nothing had happened. Loud thoughts screamed inside my skull: Is she allowed to say that? Should I say something? What does it mean if I do or don’t say something? Is it okay for me to tell that joke but not for her?
I remember thinking, “Am I a race traitor?”
Persia and Me: A Long-Distance Love Affair
I have never been to Iran, and I speak Farsi only on the rare occasions when I am around other speakers. Yet ask me for a list of Persian accomplishments and I will reel off facts from the Achaemenid dynasty through modern-day Iran. I store this information in some mental cabinet, where it is readily accessible and itching to come out. I am proud of being Persian.
If you ask me, however, what Teheran is like at rush hour, or where poets find sanctuary in Shiraz, or what colors can be seen when dusk settles over Abadan’s desert terrain, I cannot tell you. I do not know the names of the streets in any Iranian city, which flowers grow in Iran’s parks, or the difference between kebab stalls for tourists and those for locals. I have no intimate knowledge of Iranian politics; what I know, I get from the BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, just like other Westerners. We Iranians do not have a secret handshake or sly wink to let one another know what’s up. I am woefully ignorant of my mother’s culture.
That said, when I hear Farsi, I feel like I am home. It is the language I spoke before I learned English. My grandmother and I still speak it together. Its rhythm makes me comfortable, and its melody reminds me of a place to which I am—if only from a long, long distance—connected. My connection to Iran, and my “Iranian-ness,” come only from my family and their memories. As they get older, they embellish some moments and downplay others, reworking history into a narrative worth telling. Over time, their stories have become mine; my Iranian identity is a whirlpool of fact, myth, and imagination.
Shaken and Stirred
I hate it when people refer to me as half black or half Iranian. I am not half of anything: I am fully black and fully Iranian. Moreover, my identity cannot be reduced to mere fractions. It’s complicated but also simple: I am mixed, and there is no personal distress in my being so. Others, however, seem to be confused about my identity.
When I went grocery shopping with my maternal grandmother as a child, people would stare at us and wonder why a black kid was speaking a strange language with an elderly immigrant woman. When I went shopping with my mom, people would congratulate and admire her for adopting a poor colored child. Today, when I go shopping by myself, I occasionally catch people shooting me nervous glances, perhaps thinking I am a thief or a hoodlum or even a terrorist. It appears that I am still somewhat out of place.
“Black American” is a term already fraught with difficulties. For centuries, being black in America was the antithesis of the white American Dream. Being black continues to be associated with aggressiveness, criminality, stupidity, and undesirability. Despite great advances in civil rights, a host of black superstars, and a black president, there is still an outsider status that comes with being black in America.
Being Iranian American does not lessen my personal outsider status. The popular imagination in the West portrays the United States as the vanguard and protector of liberty and democracy, a stalwart ally of the Iranian people, and a beacon of hope in a dark, twisted world. Iranians, so the story goes, have responded to U.S. benevolence with prickly foreign policy, continual criticism, and an unrelenting sense of superiority. The sad reality is that American meddling helped spur (but did not cause) two Iranian revolutions that put the wrong people in power. Put simply, Iranians and Americans have a long-standing beef, and Iranian Americans desperately straddle the fence between their two cultures.
I have often joked with friends that I am America’s worst nightmare, as I am both black and Middle Eastern. There is a sad truth in the joke—blacks and Middle Easterners are certainly stereotyped and often portrayed as elements to be feared by much of American society—but also a liberating reality. I never wanted to be the guy who held a corporate job so he could buy the house with the white picket fence, move in with the girl next door, and have 2.5 kids. Growing up, I instinctively knew that that dream was for people who did not look like me, and I did not care. I was left free to explore ways of being that were not scripted on sitcoms and glorified in TV ads. I was not resentful precisely because I did not see my world as “us” versus “them.” Instead I saw multiple cultural practices in my home every day; I saw them clash and create new norms; and I saw those norms turn into a culture in and of itself. I saw that nothing was stagnant or fixed or solitary. I saw that I had options.
I was eager to explore the identity choices I found laid before me. Scholars and analysts often talk of “negotiating” or “navigating” identity. Clothing, speech patterns, hairstyles, rebelliousness, athleticism, flirtatiousness—all are used to project identity. Everyone navigates identity, but when race is introduced into the mix, the stakes are raised.
At an early age I learned how to twist my self-presentation to provoke specific responses from those around me. I was eager to figure out what identity I could drape around my shoulders most naturally. It was not the most fun or ho-hum moments that taught me which parts of myself to camouflage or accentuate—quite the opposite. To put it bluntly, I hated being followed around by store security and watching suburbanites cross the street when they saw me approaching. I learned quickly how to use my particular social constructions to my advantage.
I used my mixed identity to convey both positive and negative racial images. For example, I love coffee shops, and grabbing a cup of “joe” is a daily ritual. I choose what I wear each day largely on the basis of how I want to be treated at the coffee shop. If I want to get in and out without any hassles, I wear a black hoodie, basketball sneakers, and worn-out jeans. If I am open to conversing with retired older men sipping their lattes, I wear slacks, a thin sweater, and a trimmed beard. If I want to get some work done, I wear a T-shirt, my good jeans, and a pair of Converse kicks. Here is the fun bit: after I’ve worn a sweater in order to befriend latte-sipping regulars, when I walk in the next day wearing track pants and a Yankees cap, they often do not recognize me.
During my freshman year of college, I made the mistake of thinking that all liberal arts schools were bastions of liberalism. I dove headlong into a political conversation with a fifty-something academic, assuming he was the sort of person who would appreciate different people’s perspectives and backgrounds. He soon started railing, however, about then-candidate Barack Obama and his racial “double bind.” According to this gentleman, Obama had either to choose to be black or to claim his mother’s whiteness. He could not do both because . . . well, I’m still unclear about the “why” of it all. I clearly recall the last few moments of our conversation.
And he didn’t. He could not wrap his head around how President Obama’s narrative was possible. He was looking right at me, and he could not see a damn thing. I took it personally.
When it comes to issues of race and identity, I am just as confused as everybody else. I speak of social constructs, performances of race, and fluid identities as if they were terms I instinctively understand. The truth is, I spend an obscene amount of time trying to connect clichéd questions like “Where are you from?” and “What makes you who you are?” to abstract conceptions of race, ethnicity, and nationality. I feel immense discomfort sketching even the vaguest outline of myself, as I fear I will exaggerate one part at the expense of another. I fear that I have somehow invested in stereotypical identity narratives that strangle racial discourse, and that I will one day regret typecasting myself within such boundaries.
Most of all, I fear that someone, somewhere, will attempt to extract a morsel of wisdom from my experiences. I do not write this with any intention of being self-deprecating or to downplay the value of my testimony. There is nothing stronger than a voice declaring “I am.” It is just that my voice has not yet found its pitch. My questions about identity can be answered with academic theories and clever argumentation, but gut emotion and intellectual satisfaction are distant, distant cousins. In seeking resolution on my “true” identity, I have unstitched and re-sewn pieces of myself more times than I care to count.
Ten years from now, I may fume while reading this account of my life experiences. I may want to take red ink to the page with the fury of a moody English professor. I may think that my twenty-three-year-old self’s musings are childish or presumptuous . . . I don’t know. The point is this: I am a work in progress.
After graduating from Dartmouth College, Anise received a Master’s of Philosophy in Geography from Queen’s University Belfast. He is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Rutgers University (Camden).