Letters

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Thursday
May 17, 2001

Rootless Iranian migrant

The letter by Ms Yariz Kangani (I take it that Yariz is a "cool" female name) who, as her surname suggests, must be of some Mashahdi or Khorasani origin is a typical example the rootlessness of the "one-and-a-half" to "second" generation Iranians who have migrated to the West ["Embrace"]. I am not interested in the contents of her letter as it contains plenty of common knowledge high school stuff or tabloid paper headlines.

What is of notice in this letter is its message in which a misguided and rootless Iranian migrant is advocating the same rootlessness, that she is struggling with, to be by the other fellow expatriates. The point that she has completely missed, and hence her ensuing crisis of identity, is that General Marshals or Tony Balirs of this world and many of their likes have "first and foremost" obtained a thorough grasp of thier own cultural heritage and "then" developed interest in those of the aliens.

Obviously Ms Kangaloo has had no such challenge as her own knowledge of Iranian heritage is limited to Baba Karam dancing and eating Ghoemeh Sabzi (which, incidentally, contraray to her protestations, has proven to be among the healthiest dishes of with plenty of fiber and very low risk causing corononry conditions). I am not sure if Ms Kangani can recite any poetry of Ferdowsi, who comes from the same region of Iran as her parents do, or the works of Omar Khayyam (even the former president Bill Clinton resorted to Khayyam in his famous "apology address").

What should humiliate Ms Kangani is not the fact that there are Iranians inthe US who still cannot speak English with the same phoney Amercian accent that she has presumeably adpoted. What should humiliate and indeed shame her is the fact that there are thousands of American, British, German, French, Russian, Chinese and many other nationalities who can speak, read and write Farsi better that her and her parents put together. I am sure that she does not have any clue that Fitzgerlad who translated Rubaiyate Khayyam into English had never visited Iran and learned Persian entirely at Cambridge.

Reynold Nicholson to whom we owe the present compilation of the Rumi's Masnavi only spent a few years in Iran. Yet both of these scholars were masters of their own literary heritage first and later on developed and perfected their mastery of the Iranian cultural heritage. Ther are thousand of mixed Iranian marriages in which the non-Iranian hasbands or wives have acquired such a passionate grasp the of Iranian culture. This is what every Iranian parent should be reminded of first.

Also, Ms Kangani is wrong on the account of Freddie Mercury being Iranian. People like Freddie Mercury or Andre Agassi cannot be regarded as Iranians simply because they came of some remotely Iranian parentage. The were the true products of the Western way of life. There was hardly any Iranian influence on either them apart from some Iranian sounding names. So they were not Iranians who "embraced" a foreign culture as she tries to claim. They were born and brought up in a totally different value system. What Ms Knagarloo should should do is to step out of the narrow confines of her mind and knowledge and see the world beyond the scope tabloid papers.

Parviz

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