From War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims (University of Arkansas Press) by Melody Moezzi. War on Error brings together the stories of twelve young people, all vastly different but all American, and all Muslim.
Lounging contentedly on the bed in her apartment some thirty-five stories directly above the FDR, Roxana looks at me standing over her and proclaims,”Interview me,” as though she were Julia Roberts promoting her next blockbuster. I know this is going to be difficult. I have known Roxana for over eight years now. We met in college at Wesleyan when she was a senior and I was a freshman, and within days, we were inseparable. She was the only other Iranian girl I had heard of at Wesleyan, and she seemed to know everything and everyone there was to know there.
We were both loud, opinionated, sarcastic, and naive. We were also both virgins and agreed that men were useful almost solely for opening unyielding jars of pickles and hooking up electronic equipment. Roxana is my dearest girlfriend from college, and that may be part of the reason why she was the first person I chose to interview for this book.
That and it gave me a decent excuse to escape the Atlanta summer heat and go shopping and dancing in New York City.
I found it incredibly difficult to get Roxana to sit still and be serious long enough to conduct an interview, but I had a plan. I took her to an Indian restaurant and filled her to the point of near-explosion with samosas and chicken tikka masala. Once I got the impression that fullness had wholly debilitated her, I asked for the check and made my move. By the time we got home, her gorged state made her too weak to mock me or protest, and with a little persuasion,she began to yield.
Roxana is quite possibly the least repressed individual I have ever met. She’ll yell when she feels like it, she’ll laugh when she feels like it, she’ll cry when she feels like it, and she’ll dance when she feels like itóthe location or circumstance is pure coincidence. Demure is not part of her repertoire. She can be painfully socially inappropriate, but she could never be disingenuous if she tried.
Roxana was twelve when her family left Iran, in the summer of at the end of the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War,but the end ofanything is only apparent in hindsight. Things grew progressively worse toward the end of the war. The Iraqis started bombing Tehran that summer, and that same year, Roxana’s paternal grandparents died within seven months of each other. Roxana insists that her dad would never have left Iran and made somewhere else his permanent home as long as his mom was alive, and her death made their departure an imminent possibility. Also,on the night of the first Iraqi missile attack on Tehran, Roxana’s maternal aunt died in a car accident. After that, her mom was fainting all the time and had to be put on IV fluids. Just the sound of missiles overhead, or anything akin to it, would send her into a fainting spell.
Thus, Roxana’s mom’s deteriorating emotional state and her father’s loss of his greatest ties to Iran precipitated their flight. Her family began selling various household itemsóparticularly, she remembers a Persian rug. She recalls a man coming to buy the rug and wondering why on earth they were selling it. Of course, her parents wouldn’t tell her. They were afraid to tell her.
The rug reminded her so much of her uncle Hamid Reza, who was one of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians killed in the war. He was only twenty years old. She can’t remember why that rug reminded her so much of him, but it did. After selling it, her father told her that they were going to Japan for health screenings and to obtain their visas.
After less than a year in Japan, they moved to Victoria, British Columbia, staying for only two years before moving to Connecticut, where they continue to live today. Roxana didn’t want to leave Iran, and her parents even pushed back their flight a couple of weeks to better prepare her for the transition.
Ironically, they left two weeks after the peace treaty between Iran and Iraq was signed. Still, nothing in Iran really got any better after that. The war is a painful open wound in the collective memory of the millions of Iranians who lived through it, and its effects are still apparent today.
I personally remember an incident years after the war had ended. I was in the bathroom of my uncle’s house in Tehran when all of the lights went out. I just considered it an untimely blackout. After fiddling around to find the toilet paper and the sink, I came out to find everyone walking in circles, praying frantically. They were all certain that Iraq was bombing again. In reality, the war had ended over five years before, but in the minds and homes of so many Iranians, it was still far from over.
In elementary school, Roxana was often called in from recess on account of Iraqi missiles flying overhead. I’m sure that the American government had no idea how many future Iranian Americans it was helping to create by supporting Iraq in that war, and I’m sure that American was the last thing a good number of those children wanted to become at the time. Still, I’d venture to guess that Roxana was not the only future American on that playground.
Roxana finally became a naturalized U.S. citizen in twenty-three, but she was an American long before that. This I can attest to much better than she might ever admit herself. The girl speaks fluent English with no accent, and she talks faster (in both English and Farsi) than anyone I’ve ever met. She has lived in America for over half of her life, and she admits that when she goes back to Iran to visit her extended family, she realizes how American she truly is. When I ask her what has most shaped her American experience, she responds,”I don’t know, dude. MTV.McDonald’s.You’re not really writing that down, are you?” Of course, I’m writing it down. Is there anything more American than music videos, reality television, or Happy Meals?
I can’t think of much, but that may just be a generational thing. Regardless, there isn’t even a word for “sarcasm” in Farsi. Roxana is about as American as, I don’t know, MTV or McDonald’s. And yes, she is Muslim too.
