1982 (14 page)

I have made a short list of things I was scared of finding in Canada before arriving in the 1970s:

spiders

snow

vast land

slippery ice

bearded father

As you can see, there were a number of things to be scared of when anticipating an inaugural trip to Canada at the age of seven. You may be wondering why “bearded father” is on that list. That item has to do with my father’s absence from the family for a few months. He had travelled to Canada in advance of the rest of us. In our time away from each other, I grew very worried that my father would become unrecognizable to me and that when I saw him again in our new Canadian home he would look like a foreigner. I worried that he’d be angry and mean. I decided that this unfriendly and foreign demeanour would find expression in my father having a beard. That made sense to me. Fortunately, when we got to Canada in December of 1974, I realized that there were no swarms of spiders, that the snow was actually fun, and that we had moved to another city that wasn’t as daunting as the term “vast land” implied. And also, to my great relief, I found that my father did not have a beard.

But most important, after the fears, coming to Canada meant liberation. It was liberation from the homogenous
nature of our previous community in Middlesex, England. I very quickly felt like I belonged in Toronto. I felt a sense of belonging more than I had in any other place. It was like I had walked into a first-generation immigrant dreamland.

Upon settling into Don Mills, I made new friends immediately. And my posse was a veritable mini–United Nations. It included Aris, who was Greek; Roy, whose parents were Indian; David, who was black; and Umar, whose Pakistani-German family, the Jans, became our best friends. I was no longer Blackie. I didn’t stand out at all. Not for my skin colour or background. We were in a region full of people who had just come from other parts of the world. I decided I loved Canada. Everyone was like me. No one called me anything other than my own name. I didn’t even mind that I had an English accent, because many of the other kids had funny accents, too. I soon had a girlfriend. She was Korean. Well, okay, maybe she wasn’t a real girlfriend—it was Grade 3. But her name was Nina Chee, and she was cute and we had a bond. Our bond involved me running away from Nina Chee even though I had strange butterflies whenever I saw her. I had strange butterflies and then she would talk to me and then I would run away. It usually happened in that order. That was the extent of our relationship. But I never really noticed or cared that she was Korean. It all felt comfortable. My friends and my surroundings were very diverse. I had a glorious moment of childhood when I didn’t really question my identity or that of others. Not much.

Then things changed. Two years later, when my parents decided to move us to a conservative part of old Thornhill, my world was dramatically altered. We were now living in an
established suburban area of note. It was supposedly a move upward. We had a big new home. But we were alone in our new-immigrant status in this community. And we stood out. And I was skinny. And then the revolution happened in Iran. And I began to fight a turf war against my own ethnicity. I knew I was different. And I became quite sure that was not okay.

BY THE TIME I ENTERED
Grade 9 at Thornlea Secondary School in the fall of 1981, I had become resentful of my Iranian background. It was all very annoying. Other kids in Thornhill had families that had been in Canada for generations. Their parents didn’t have accents or weird rituals. Besides, there were no Iranian New Wave role models. Being Iranian was a liability if you wanted to be New Wave. Can you imagine the members of Duran Duran being Iranian? No, you can’t. You can’t because they wouldn’t have been. Not in the ’80s. They were all white and had perfect noses and straight hair.

If the members of Duran Duran had been Iranian, they would have looked less out of place when they made “exotic” videos like the one for “Hungry Like the Wolf” in 1982. The premise for that video was that the members of Duran Duran were white English guys stuck in a foreign land. In fact, they were so emphatic about their bleached Caucasian appearance that the keyboard player of Duran Duran wore white makeup so he’d look even whiter. That meant he didn’t look very Persian.

Besides, Bowie wasn’t Iranian. Neither was Wendy. And neither was Sting or Stewart Copeland or any of my heroes. And movie stars looked like Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood.

Not like me. My aspiration became the denial of my ancestry. I was just doing what I needed to do to survive.

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t forgo our Persian traditions or values or my mother’s cooking. Not behind closed doors. A significant proportion of my body already consisted of basmati rice and saffron by the ’80s. I couldn’t just give that up. And I loved my family and wanted to respect our roots. But I didn’t like the public baggage that came with being Middle Eastern. It had never been easy to explain our culture to those who knew nothing about Persians. Then, after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran had gone from being a somewhat glamorous curiosity for Westerners to being seen as an evil enemy of everything from capitalism to civility to rock music to America.

Clearly, the regime was despicable. But the line grew too blurred between the way Westerners saw the oppressive new Iranian theocracy and the generalizations they would then make about Persian people. We were all tainted. The proud history of Iranian creativity and culture was ignored. There was little information about the legacy of ideas and technology and poetry and dance that had been spawned in Persia. To the West, Iranians were summed up in one big dangerous stereotype. People assumed we were all hairy and angry, like the ayatollahs they saw on TV.

It wasn’t until I was in university and a racist film called
Not Without My Daughter
received wide theatrical release that I would decide to take action. In this Sally Field movie, the caricature of all Iranians as barbarians is so ridiculous it would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive. Yet there was no outcry at the time, because the Persian community in North
America was still too small and too timid to speak out. That was 1991. It was only then that I truly realized I took pride in my Iranian heritage and should not succumb to stereotypes about us.

At that point, I became very public in accepting my background. I wrote an editorial about the film and the negative depiction of Iranians for the York University newspaper
Excalibur
. And I didn’t shy away from my identity during my campaign to become president of the student federation at York that year. By then, I was an activist. By then, I had some confidence. And I would never forgive Sally Field. But that was after the 1980s. That was after many years of hiding in the cultural closet.

Before 1979, things had been much better for the few of us of Persian background that had immigrated to Canada. Even if I was ethnic, I was seen more as exotic than terrorist. I only had to deal with people like Annie McMillan on our street in Thornhill, who wondered if we ate “Arab food.” Annie didn’t mean to offend. Besides, she wore tight jeans and she looked like Kristy McNichol. She had a nice tan. Most people just didn’t know much about Iran. And when they did, Persians generally had a good reputation. Iran had been, after all, a staunch ally of the West.

In the late ’70s, when I was in Grade 5, I’d seen pictures in a newspaper of Farrah Fawcett and Colonel Steve Austin visiting Iran. They were a glamorous Hollywood couple. I took the newspaper clipping from the Henderson Avenue Public School library and brought it home to show my parents. Steve Austin was the star of a TV show called
The Six Million Dollar Man
. He was a real action hero. Well, actually, he had bionic limbs.

That made him even better than a real action hero. And it was a triumphant moment for many Iranian kids when he visited Iran with his beautiful wife from
Charlie’s Angels
. Everyone thought Farrah Fawcett was sexy, and she had layered blondish hair that flowed from high on her head, and she wore bikinis. Colonel Steve Austin and Farrah Fawcett were on their second honeymoon, and they spent it in Tehran. They were so in love they needed two honeymoons. Everyone talked about how they chose to go to a Middle Eastern country to express their love. Iran was considered a modern and exciting foreign place to travel to.

Apparently, the shah’s son was a fan of
The Six Million Dollar Man
, and he had convinced his father to invite the couple to visit. The actor who played Colonel Steve Austin was actually called Lee Majors, but that seemed a silly name to use when you could be called the Six Million Dollar Man and you had bionic powers. It was clear that Colonel Steve Austin thought Iran was cool. I remember being proud of my background that day with the newspaper clipping, even if we were different from the white families on our street.

But all this changed after the revolution in ’79. In the months after the shah was ousted, fundamentalist Iranian students took fifty-two innocent American workers hostage and an old bearded guy wearing a turban named Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated power with some other bearded guys wearing turbans. You probably remember this if you were alive at the time. It was big news. And in this case, being bearded really did mean you were scary. Khomeini always looked stern and angry. He wasn’t like my Persian uncles, who were sweet and generous and had big, friendly personalities.