third world country citizens
The year was 1980. Two years after moving to Minneapolis as a family for a two years stay. Within the two years we were here, Iran went through a revolution and had entered a war initiated by Iraq.
My grandfather was very sick and my dad decided to go back to Tehran, in the middle of war to see him. I was fifteen and was beyond terrified. I had watched a land I knew as a loving home for the past two years turn into a war zone, led by angry men, through my television set in Minneapolis. Nothing made sense. Men I didn’t recognize. Men whose voice and frustration was new to a thirteen year old who had never known the deep pain of many, decades of history, unknown to me.
We accompanied my dad to the airport. I couldn’t speak, had a lump in my throat and was simply confused at the ease with which my dad was ready to travel. He hadn’t returned to Iran since we came to Minneapolis in July of 1978. Somehow he wasn’t afraid. When I asked him, he said, “baba joon, I’m going back to my country, what’s to be afraid of?”
My fifteen year old mind said, “Everything baba joon. You’re supposed to be afraid of everything! It’s a freaking war!!”
Those were days when you walked into the airport and after checking in you went to your gate, accompanied with your family and friends. No one checked your bag and there was no such thing as security. People were still smoking in the airport.
Yet, that day was different for us. When he went to check his bag and get his seat, he was directed to a table in the middle of the airport. There, two young boys rudely told my dad to set his luggage on the table. He did. They proceeded to open his luggage and threw every item he had so meticulously packed all over the table. Some fell to the ground and my dad, my dad picked them up and set them on the table. They asked him questions as if he had committed a crime. I watched, absolutely horrified and deep in shame. People passing by and looking at us in the same manner that we had been treated for the past two uncomfortable years, since Iran’s revolution. We were guilty simply because we were Iranians. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. My voice had already been silenced since the hostage taking in Nov. 1979, but these moments lodged deep in my body. Sima locked within herself. Sima’s voice silenced.
After the humiliating search, they instructed my dad to pack his bag. He did. Of course in his meticulous manner. Folding each piece of clothing in his patient manner and packing his luggage with the respect and dignity he treats everything he has owned in his life.
Walking to the gate I remember asking my dad if he wasn’t angry. He said, “Baba joon, they just did what they were supposed to do.” I asked, wanting to hear something else, but why was this humiliating search okay? No one else was searched and I’d never seen anyone treated that way. “That’s just the way it is. Don’t worry azeezam.”
And so was the beginning of hundreds of minute aggression, disrespect and treatment because we are ‘third world country citizens.’
For centuries this nation’s subconscious has been taught they are the chosen ones, special people. We didn’t know this. While so many people are seeing the bias so many immigrants go through, majority of our nation plus most of our language and chosen stories remind us that people of the third world are less than……
We are better than them……
I salute the men and women of my beloved region who have shaped me, despite the fact that they have had to go through decades of humiliation and always stayed silent. I also am grateful to live in a country where I have had the rare privilege to be witness and in friendship with to so many cultures, peoples, and diversity of faith.
Today I dedicate my words of my heart to my baba who still walks and lives with dignity and his love and care for everything around him, his way.
