Hyphen

Pardis Mahdavi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501373916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. Hyphen follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity-"Hyphen" is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning "to tie together" -to the present, but also uncovers the politics of the hyphen and the role it plays in creating identities. The journey of this humble piece of connective punctuation reveals the quiet power of an orthographic concept to speak to the travails of hyphenated individuals all over the world. Hyphen is ultimately a compelling story about the powerful ways that language and identity intertwine. Mahdavi-herself a hyphenated Iranian-American-weaves in her own experiences struggling to find a sense of self amidst feelings of betwixt and between. Through stories of the author and three other individuals, Hyphen collectively considers how to navigate, articulate, and empower new identities. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

PART 1

Ancestors Worshipped

1 My Big Fat Persian Wedding

Every time I said my name in school, I felt caught between two worlds. Should I say my name as it was written in Persian with equal weight between the two syllables Par and dis as my parents did? Or should I make things easier for my American teachers and classmates who wanted to Anglicize my name by focusing either on the last syllable—saying Par-dis or just muttering the ugly Prds—erasing the vowels from my name altogether? When I tried to correct people, their non-native Persian-speaking brains could not comprehend my pronunciation, and so it came that I began introducing myself with the Anglicized version of my name, feeling a little pinch each time I did so.

My family left Iran in 1978 due to the impending Iranian Revolution. But, instead of moving to a big city with other migrants and refugees, my parents decided to settle in a suburb outside Minneapolis where we were among the only Brown people the community had ever seen. Rather than try to integrate or assimilate, my parents held fiercely to their Iranian-ness, insisting on speaking Persian loudly in public, and outfitting me in traditional Iranian dress instead of allowing me to venture into denim.

The spring and summer of 1985 stand out in my mind as heightened months of liminality.

It was an unusually warm spring day for Minneapolis, and my backpack’s right strap dug into my shoulder as I swung it around to my front so I could hunt for the small Ziploc baggie of breadcrumbs I had stashed before school. My plan was to convince my mother to let me feed the duck family living on the lake near our house. That’s when I knocked into my four-year-old brother, Paymohn, and he screamed loud enough for my mother to turn around from the front seat of our Volvo. She started yelling at me in rapid Persian.

“What are you doing? Do I need to pull over? Apologize to your brother right now! You are the older sister, set a better example.”

“Only three years older,” I muttered under my breath as I slunk deeper into the folds of the cream-colored, leather-lined seats. I looked out the window to be sure no one had heard my mother screaming—not because I was embarrassed about being yelled at, but because I was worried people would hear her speaking in what Minnesotans commonly referred to as “that funny language.”

I was only seven years old in 1985, but I knew the importance of appearance and language. My attempts at coming off as the quintessential American seven-year-old were thwarted regularly by my maternal grandmother who lived with us in Wayazata. My grandmother refused to learn English and insisted on packing my lunchbox full of Persian rice and stews made with aromatic spices like coriander and fenugreek leaves that wafted throughout the cafeteria.

And if my name wasn’t bad enough, the thick black hair that seemed to grow out of every pore on my body was an additional marker of my otherness. The kids at Woods Academy teased me so badly that on many days I wanted to stay at home in the comfort of my grandmother’s lap.

On this particular morning, I had begged my parents to let me stay home from school. “The kids have gotten meaner somehow,” I said in English. My mother flashed me the look, demanding that I switch back to Persian. I was stubborn in my desire to acculturate and refused; only if I caught my grandmother’s sad eyes would I acquiesce, not wanting her to be left out.

My father bounded down the stairs with my brother clinging to his leg. One hand cradled my brother’s head in his hands while the other was buttoning his over-starched white oxford shirt. My mother quickly told him that I wanted to stay home from school.

“School is your job,” my father said. He then launched into his usual lecture about the importance of education.

“They can take everything from you, Pardis. They can take your home, your belongings,” my father lectured, “they can even take your country. But the one thing that no one can ever take from you is your education. They can never take your mind.”

My father’s whole life revolved around his education. My parents had met in Iran in the early 1970s before my father came to the United States in 1972 as a chief resident at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Americans were eager for well-trained Iranian physicians, and my father, like my two uncles, had been recruited straight from Tehran University Medical School after he completed his residency and mandatory military service of two years.

My father had met my mother only briefly in Iran through her brother who was, at the time, my father’s roommate. My mother, who attended a French Catholic school in Tehran most of her life, had been accepted to University of Montreal for her bachelor’s degree. Her father had recently died, and she and my grandmother decided to try living abroad for a few years; Canada made sense to them because they both spoke French, but not English. When my uncle and father were sent to Chicago, my mother and grandmother decided to pay them a visit on their way to Montreal.

My mother never made it to Montreal. What was supposed to have been a two week stop-over in Chicago to help my uncle settle in turned into a four-year relationship with my father that ended with them returning to Tehran to marry and start a family. My mother un-enrolled from the University of Montreal, and learned English by tutoring my uncle’s girlfriends in Persian in exchange for English tutoring. She also enrolled at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she studied industrial engineering.

A few weeks after she graduated, she and my father returned to Tehran for what appeared—from the faded photographs on our walls—to have been a spectacular wedding. My mother was thrilled to be home in Tehran. But this was 1977, and her joy was short-lived as the revolution was already brewing.

My parents were against the shah and marched in the streets, calling for his removal. People were being arrested following the protests, and my father began to realize that it was going to be dangerous for them to stay in their native country. It was he who initially begged my mother to leave Iran and return to the United States. At the time, he could still return to his job in Chicago. My mother (who would pass on her stubbornness to me) refused. There was nothing in Chicago for her, she told him. And they owed it to their country to stay.

Six months later my mother was arrested after marching in a protest. When she was released, she realized she was pregnant. My father was thrilled by this news, but it also made him even more determined to convince my mother to leave. He was certain that Iran was not a safe place to raise a family. By now, his position in Chica go was no longer available, but that did not weaken his resolve. He searched and found a job in Minneapolis and went ahead of my mother to find a house and a graduate program where she could pursue her studies.

In July 1978, my father called Tehran and told my mother she had been admitted with a full scholarship. Belly swollen, nationalism deflated, my mother agreed to join him in Minnesota on one condition—my grandmother would come along as well. My father agreed. In August, my mother was eight months pregnant with me, and she boarded the last plane that left Tehran to the United States for the next forty years. It was also the last international flight to depart for some months while the revolution bubbled through the country.

This was a story my parents told me weekly. It was the story of their sacrifice: of how they lost everything in Iran but were able to survive in America because of—and through their—education. Education was the only global currency that could keep you alive, and it was my job to keep earning mine.

So, on that spring day in 1985, I pulled on my red and blue outercoat and slung my backpack over my shoulder, getting ready to trudge to school. My grandmother sensed my buzzing irritation and slowly came to the door where my mother was kneeling to help me tie my shoelaces.

“I think the mother duck finally had her ducklings,” she whispered in my ear.

I watched her place the Ziploc bag filled with breadcrumbs in my backpack. My mother looked up to see what her mother was doing.

“Maybe stop by to see the ducks today after school,” my grandmother instructed my mother. My mother nodded silently and instantly I felt better.

That day at school things were surprisingly calm. No one teased me about my fragrant lunch, and during P.E. I wasn’t even the last one picked for the dodgeball teams. By the afternoon, I was actually glad I had come to school.

I spotted my mother’s blue Volvo and jumped into the car. I then pulled out the baggie of breadcrumbs, figuring that if I could get my brother excited about the ducks, we would be certain to have longer at the lake. Paymohn grabbed the baggie out of my hand and started shaking it.

My mother turned around again, her olive skin flushed red. “What are you doing with that?! You are going to make a mess!” My mother grabbed the breadcrumbs and stuffed them into the car’s ashtray.

I felt hot tears spring to my eyes because I knew this meant we weren’t going to stop at the lake after all.

“It’s okay, Dabis,” Paymohn said, using the version of my name that his three-year-old tongue could manage to produce. “Ghamarjoon will walk us there later, after Mommy goes back to work,” he added, referring to our grandmother.

Our mother had to return to my father’s medical practice where she was in charge of billing and practice management. She had finished her master’s in international communication but never had a chance to use it. Instead of pursuing her own dreams, she swam into the medical field to help her husband. Before long she was pregnant with my brother, and her hopes of becoming a journalist drifted further away, never to return.

It wasn’t until many years later, when I had three children of my own and was trying to run a school, that I understood the depth of her fatigue. The exhaustion of her work–life balance was exacerbated by the precarity of our position as Iranians their in the United States. She and my father had completed education here, and both of her children were American born, but she still kept a suitcase packed in the corner of the house, always ready for departure, to return home.

The weight of uncertainty—of not knowing if, or when, she may return home—was yet another thing my mother carried around in that enormous sack on her shoulders. She carried her children, mother, husband, brothers, and her home country around with her at all times. No wonder she was so tired.

I caught my mother’s eyes in the rear-view mirror and noticed the purple circles that had deepened there. My tears retreated, and I felt a wince of pity for my mom. As we pulled up to the house, she asked if we could get out and walk to the front door so that she didn’t have to pull into the garage.

She was running late again. I agreed and pulled first my backpack, and then my brother out of the car. As the Volvo crept away, my brother and I slowly walked up to the front door hand in hand. We were careful not to step on the cracks in the pavement—a game we loved to play, where we pretended they contained molten lava. In the summers, when moss grew between the cracks, we felt vindicated in our imaginations.

As we hopped clo...