Listen to Nazanin Zarepour read Diaspora Prose:
Returning to Iran—a land which I was not born but wish I had been—is naught but a Shia pilgrimage.
Not because Iran is Shia. Rather, because it is with similar mourning that I confront this very soil my mother, father, and I would visit every summer.
1997–2015, as the months grew warmer, I was carried across the ocean by my parents to be acquainted with a life to which they were anything but unacquainted. And it is seldom discussed—how alienating it is—to confront a land with your mother and father and experience an entirely different theoretical terrain than they do. After all, it was their home, and I, just a visitor.
I return again at the ripe age of 22—this time not only without my parents but also without the summer’s scorch.
Muharram passed before my arrival, yet the pilgrimage for me had just begun.
It takes simply the door of my late grandfather’s home to make me cry a parallel army of tears that my grandmother would shed at Ashura. Just the image of the stained-glass window, fresh cantaloupe, and the sound of my grandfather asking me to teach him English on the back of a newspaper clipping.
It brings me the same religious yearning as a pious follower in search and in awe of his Creator. I, too, am searching for this ancestral Creator, this Self, and this identity—to which I am spiritually linked yet temporally not.
Here lays another source of my identity—yet it is seldom tenacious.
And so it goes, as the mourning of Muharram, I find myself in a fruitless quest to understand Mortality, Essence, and Self. And so it goes, I shed my grandmother’s tears at the sound of “Hossein.”
Nazanin Zarepour is a student at the University of Toronto studying Political Science and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. She is a writer and photographer; her works can be found in publications such as Acta Victoriana, FEELS magazine, and the Trinity Review.
This work appears in the Winter 2020 edition of the UC Review: Translation.