peek-a-boo

by Roshana Ghaedi

“I wonder if there’ll be war this summer,” my mother says as she rifles through the salad with a spork, trying to resurrect the damp, unappetizing lettuce leaves.

“Not in the summer,” my aunt responds listlessly, too busy braiding her daughter’s hair to look up. “It’s much too hot.”

My mother sighs with disappointment at her wilting salad and drops the subject without much fanfare.

For weeks now, my family has been toying with the idea of war: casually, furtively, between bites of food, in the momentary silence when I am tying my shoelaces before going out the door. The idea is passed around with dessert after dinner, posed anxiously to the mailman as he turns to leave, dissected with the butcher as we wonder whether to stock up on Iranian saffron before prices go up. We’ve been playing peek-a-boo with war my whole life. Dozens of charming family anecdotes have ended abruptly with: “and then the bombs dropped and all the windows in the house shattered.”

We’re never quite brave enough to go further than that—my mother’s screaming nightmares are description enough.

I have been spared the horrors of war, except in my imagination. And yet, it’s a question that I’ve been asked again and again by strangers in pool halls and professors in classrooms, and never with the kind-hearted indirectness of my family. There isn’t really a way to prepare yourself for your professor asking, with a neutral, sleepy expression what you think about the possibility of a nuclear strike in Tehran. Well, I say carefully, I suppose my aunt wouldn’t like that very much.

At bars, men like to lay the charges against my people at my feet. Backwards, violent, misogynistic, homophobic, an existential threat to Israel, antagonistic to the West, and worst of all anti-miniskirt. They fix me with raised eyebrows, their pursed lips waiting for my statement of defence. Well, what now? I want to ask. Should we all lay down peacefully and die for our sins? What charge have you against us that means we no longer deserve to live?

“Surely,” they will argue, “you must see that the situation of women in Iran must change.”

Oh yes, I think, but the very first condition of our freedom, quite a necessary one you might agree, is for us to continue living.

There’s always a follow-up, a second route of argument. Eventually, these men get frustrated. Why won’t I just give in? Why won’t I just accept what is, to them, a clear truth? Iran is a problem country after all, an unsympathetic place full of alien mullahs and frightening rants in a foreign language. (Funnily, the word barbarian comes from the bar-bar-bar babbling which was all the Greeks could make of our ancient speech.) What do you want from me? I wonder as I look at these clever, progressive men. Am I supposed to cheer for my own destruction? Smile at your benevolent, murderous face?

And yet eventually I will. With a smooth smile and a nonsequitur, I will let his brutal, plastic-packaged truth win the day, as it has for the past many decades.

The truth that I know, I leave unspoken. The truth is that if war is to be avoided, it will be because the cost is too high to the people who matter. Here we are, each Brian and Lisa and Jane an individual miracle, their pale skin a beacon against the encroaching darkness of the world. And over there they are, the millions of Alis and Amirs and Fatimas, swarming in their own filth and fit only to die—we’ve seen it on the CBC, so it must be true. Some of us just have shorter lifespans than others, like flies.

What I don’t say is: yes, most of that is probably true and yet we still deserve to live. Or, just once I want my mother to be able to talk about her country without fear. Or, you’ve already killed so many of us, when will it be enough? Or— there’s no point. I’m already out of time.