Today, my heart is breaking for Fariba.
33 years ago, Fariba’s husband, a chemical engineer if I am remembering this right, was doing his graduate study at the University of Florida. I was teaching at Santa Fe College and had just begun my own Ph.D. work at UF. Fariba, a public health doctor in Iran, was in my English class. I loved Fariba - still love Fariba, though I have not heard from her in some time and I have no idea how she has been surviving the bombs dropping in her country. I emailed to ask: “How are you? I love you. I am praying, day by day and moment by moment, for your well-being and for the peace that our species and our planet so desperately need.”
The email was bounced back: “Sorry, your message cannot be delivered. This mailbox is disabled.”
Fariba was in my class in 1993, the year that a truck bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Fariba is muslim and she wore hijab in class. When I visited her at her house, when she came to my house to teach me how to cook, when we were chatting over coffee and turning the kitchen into an alchemist’s heaven that transformed ordinary foods into Iranian delicacies, she of course left her hijab draped on its hanger and we went about our business. On many of these afternoons, Fariba would talk about how the hijab gave her freedom. In the heat of a Florida summer, when our college students peeled their wardrobes down to shorts, t-tops, and flip-flops, Fariba felt herself to be more protected, more dignified, more at peace with her hijab covering her head and her long sleeves protecting her from the sun. There was no need to worry about how she was perceived - was she pretty enough? Sexy? A desirable object for other men? She did not want any of that - she wanted to think, to learn, to share her culture and learn ours. She felt more free to do that when the attention was taken away from her physical appearance and placed firmly on her human-beingness.
Fariba was (is - please, please, please, let this be an “IS”!) stunningly beautiful. In class, from time to time young girls would ask her to take her hijab off - they wanted to see her hair, what she looked like under the brightly colored cloths with which she draped herself. They were uncomfortable, they wanted her to look like them, to eradicate any sign of difference. They felt the hijab to be separating them from Fariba, and, occasionally, they would tug at the fabric around her face and pull the hijab out of place. Fariba always had to struggle, then, to be polite to these girls while re-positioning her hijab and re-focusing attention back on the work they were supposed to be doing.
Just two years before Fariba took my class, the United States had waged the First Persian Gulf War - a war that came a scant 2 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Glasnost, and Perestroika . . . a war that foreign policy experts by and large consider “a case of . . . erroneous assumptions and miscalculations on both sides.” Through the long years of the cold war, “communism” had been the threat against which the “West” had identified itself. Within 2 years of the communist threat giving way to free markets, Americans had what Bernard Trainor calls “a new organizing principle.” As he wrote in 2009:
The U.S. . . . . has always had to have organizing principles. In the 1930s, it was getting out of the Depression. Then came WWII, the defeat of fascism and the Japanese. During the Cold War, the organizing principle was dealing with the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear war. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no organizing principle. Then events in the Middle East took a turn. Since that time, the United States’ organizing principle has been dealing with the Middle East, with its many ramifications—fundamental Islam, terrorism, insurgencies, failed states, WMD. It all starts with the Kuwait war.
This new organizing principle fomented stereotypes of the muslim, the Arab, as “terrorists,” as the threat against which Americans had to defend themselves.
Between 1991 and 2001, I watched this new organizing principle spread fear, and watched fear grow into hatred.
This fear and hatred spread in Trenton High School, just outside of Gainesville, Florida, where I taught in-between my M.A. and my Ph.D. I wrote about this in my first book, The Wars We Inherit: MIlitary Life, Gender Violence, and Memory - let me quote here a passage from Wars about a day that this fear and hatred broke my heart:
I heard about it during third period--that Todd's stepfather had come back from Kuwait, where his reserve unit had been deployed during the Persian Gulf War, with pictures. He has these pictures displayed in the auditorium, and students have been going in all day to look at them. Photographs of dead Iraqis--limbs missing, blood everywhere. I can't believe the high school principal let him bring these pictures to school, set up a public display. I can't believe this school is sending students in to look, with pride, at pictures of dead Iraqis. The boys come back from the auditorium, euphoric, happy, proud...What are we doing to these boys? They are children--fourteen, fifteen, sixteen--they don't even shave! And these words are coming out of their mouths, dehumanizations, obscenities. They are learning to forget that these are human beings they are looking at...
I told my students: This is wrong. This war, these deaths, these things are cause for grief, for mourning, not for celebration. I told the principal these pictures should not be displayed. I had my students watch the news, explained to them the history of the 1980s, when the United States was funding Saddam Hussein and building his army. I tried to give them some of the historical context of which they were completely ignorant--about the Shah of Iran, the revolution and the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, the Iran-Iraq war. My students told their parents what I told them. Their parents compalined to the principal. The principal told me not to talk about the war anymore.
Amnesia. Denial. A blind patriotism that, in its blindness, loves killing. (pp. 122-123.)
Between 1991 and the time Fariba took my English class at Santa Fe College in 1993, my students had for 2 years been growing fear and hatred. Fariba felt that fear directed against her, the hatred growing around her.
When Fariba and her husband went back to Iran, her country was still reeling from the Iraq-Iran war of the 80s and from the repercussions of the world marching steadily towards the next war - the “War on Terror,” officially named “the Global War on Terrorism.” It took only a decade for the First Persian Gulf War to pave the road to the war on terror world, and for my friend Fariba to become an “enemy” of the United States of America. When the United States declared Iran part of the Axis of Evil, my letters to and from Fariba, my emails, the professional support we offered to each other, became suspect. Frequently, I would send Fariba books - English as a Second Language books for her students, public health books in English. In 2002, she was dealing with a critical problem of children going blind from Vitamin A deficiency . . . deficiencies aggravated by sanctions that deprived Iranian children of food, medicine, and health care. Every time I sent a bottle of vitamin A to Fariba, I felt how paltry and insignificant the gesture was.
Fariba, for her part, sent me beautiful gifts. A tablecloth in the most exquisite geometrical design. Carved wooden jewelry boxes. A stunning collar necklace. One day, shortly after the infamous Axis of Evil speech, a package from Fariba came for me. The mailman stormed angrily to my door, beat on it, and, when I opened the door, demanded to know what this thing I had received from Iran was.
An angry mailman delivering a gift from Fariba could, by 2002, have called the Department of Homeland Security and reported me as a terrorist threat. And the Department of Homeland Security, without any warning, without due process, with no legal protections for me, could have taken me out of my home and sent me to secret detention centers located all over the world.
I am glad that neither my mailman nor any of the people that began surveilling me took those steps. But I do know that I was surveilled. I know this because one of my very dearest beloveds, an American citizen born in Crestview, Florida, came from a Pakistani family. I at that time went back and forth between using an old yahoo email account and my work address, so my friend frequently sent messages to both addresses. When I received a message on my yahoo account, but not my Georgia Southern account, I put in an IT work request to find out what had happened. I never got a full or a complete answer to the question of how my email disappeared. This was in the days when the Carnivore surveillance software was installed on Internet Service Providers and scanning our emails, the websites that we visited, files that we shared. In a roundabout and hush hush fashion, one of the tech team investigating what happened hinted that my mail was flagged because of who I was in contact with . . . my American friend whose family immigrated from Pakistan, Fariba, who was trying to keep children from going blind in Iran.
33 years later, unable to reach Fariba, bombs flying between Israel and Iran, and now the US dropping bombs as well, my heart is breaking. It is breaking for every child learning fear and hatred in their schools, their churches, their families, their communities. It is breaking for every act that comes from this fear and hatred - for the name calling and the hate speech and the violence against human beings that are called “enemy” and so stripped of their human value. It is breaking for all of the children who lost their vision because they had no food or access to a simple vitamin. It is breaking for Fariba, and what she has suffered, and for the helplessness of the ordinary citizen when the leaders of nations bring them into war.
And my heart is breaking for my fellow citizens, for Americans who have forgotten that, a few decades ago, we lost our way. I remember the celebrations of 1989 and 1990, when the end of the cold war promised a new era of peace and prosperity, a globally interconnected world that heralded “hope and optimism.” That world was within our grasp, but we – we the people of the United States and in many other parts of the world - could not yet grasp it. We were not ready.
And here is where the hope comes into my heart, breaking for Fariba, breaking for our broken world. Over so many years, as fear and hatred were rising and surveillance software was tracking us and terror was growing around the world, Fariba and I loved each other. We supported each other, we held each other in love and light and prayed for the time when we were not divided by national interests and the wars that governments make. Today, when I cannot find Fariba and the broken pieces of my heart threaten to fall completely apart, I trace the edges of love and hope in this circle necklace, in this exquisitely carved jewelry box.
We lost our way, could not yet grasp that we have the possibility to make that world of hope and optimism that so many of us dreamed of in the early 1990s.
Hope creeps back into the broken places in my heart when I remember Fariba and I washing and chopping verdant piles of cilantro, parsley, and dill for the Kuku Sabzi I was learning how to make. Hope creeps back with the faith that Fariba, wherever she is, is still helping the children, still holding life, with love, as sacred.
Hope comes with love, and it is with love that we must face fear and terror.
Love and light,
Lori
Tears. Thanks for this, Lori.
Thank you Lori, I will always be grateful to meet you in my way. I only can immagine what it was to meet you as Farida. Let’s hope and love more. 🙏