Home. A fragment of a sentence. Fragments of fields, pieces of a place. How can you have nostalgia for a place you’ve never been? For a language that struggles to sit on your tongue because you cannot plant your feet in the soil its syntax grew out of.
My mother tells me stories about Iran so acutely, I’ve lost my own hearing in the crowds of Tairish Bazaar. I’ve touched the chipped paint of stairwells and courtyard gates. I let mulberries and sour cherries stain my fingertips before we turned onto her street. I ran alongside her and her siblings through narrow alleys still glowing long after sunset. I’ve even sat by her side as she counted tomans at the kitchen table while her father watched patiently.
The feelings echo in my body so strongly, I swear the memories are my own. I want them to be. Maybe I’ve inherited them the same way I did my mother’s genes. Since I was a child, I’ve repeated the same sentiment I write now as a college senior: I want to go home. Well if these sentiments are as strong as I contend they are, then is “go” the right word? Dare I say I want to return home.
Yet, when I share my deep yearning, I’m met with shame, confusion or both. People interrogate me: Is it safe? Why would you want to go there? As if longing for my country is controversial. Various orientalist narratives reduce one of the oldest and most beautiful countries to sand dunes, to bombs, to — nothing. It’s like asking why you would want to be held in your mother’s arms. Why wouldn’t I want the hums of Persian poetry that already flows through my blood to have a heartbeat?
Often, I find that the more news we are fed about Iran, the more Iran itself becomes obscured from my mother’s memory, and other Iranians’ lived experiences. Its centuries of people, history and culture are collapsed into a regime less than 50 years old, filtered through political propaganda and narratives that leave little room for anything else. These misconceptions have followed my parents as they tried to assimilate into America, as they were spat on, assaulted, ridiculed and told to “go back home” — as if home wasn’t the very thing they prayed for every night.
When war broke out this year, these misconceptions only hardened. They influenced a new false binary: pro-regime or pro-imperialism, as though those are the only two positions available to us. They aren’t.
Imperialism can be opposed without defending a regime that has stripped its people of their freedoms, imprisoned them and killed those who demand a different future. We can condemn the Islamic Republic of Iran without resorting to Islamophobia or imagining the West as Iran’s salvation. And we can recognize the regime’s use of religion as a tool of tyranny without reducing Islam itself to oppression.
My mother and her family were Muslim, and they still had to flee after the Iranian Revolution. Their faith did not protect them from persecution, nor did it spare them from having to leave the country they loved. The Islamic Republic’s oppression is not an honest reflection of Islam. Rather, it is the work of a government that weaponizes religion to legitimize its violence and silence dissent.
These truths are not mutually exclusive, yet they are so often treated as they are. Many Iranians I’ve spoken with understand this nuance, but their voices are seemingly drowned out by those who lean furthest into these extremes. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the art of holding two, if not multiple, truths at once — the art of nuance. Instead, we’re pushed to choose one side of a story, further dividing us rather than encouraging us to understand the whole.
This loss of nuance has come at the expense of educational humility. We’ve become more interested in defending our beliefs than expanding or questioning them. I’m not immune to it either. Even as I write this, I feel compelled to explain every nuance, every contradiction, afraid that if I leave something unsaid, that I’m doing my country a disservice. But no one person can carry the burden of explaining it all. We have to be willing to relearn this art with open minds. I can’t tell you what every Iranian thinks, wants or believes. But they deserve the right to respectfully express it without fear.
My mother’s memories were never of a perfect country, but one full of contradictions of hardship and harmony. Still, I want people to see Iran through her eyes. The Iran that lives in Persian poetry, in centuries of art and resilience. Where Cyrus the Great authored one of the earliest known charters of human rights, rights that so many Iranians are denied today. I want Iran to be known for what it has given the world, not only reduced to what its government has taken from its people.
Like living in my mother’s stories, or being held in her arms — I want to go home.
MiC Assistant Editor Nadia Jahanbin can be reached at ntanaz@umich.edu
