Iran, the ambiguous, and myself

As I sat there on the bullet train, whizzing by yet another nondescript Japanese city in the endless concrete jungle between Osaka and Tokyo, with all those conflicting signs of prosperity and symptoms of malaise outside my window, I couldn’t escape the irony, the excruciating awkwardness of what the news ticker at the front of the car told me. What it said was simple: with a lexical poker face, with the driest, most boringly journalistic stoicism, it announced the preliminary results of the presidential election in Iran. And what it told was different: it told the story of me, and the story of my mother and of her mother and of all the pain and joy and tears and hope that being a refugee entails.

But I can’t complain. Even if it was tough for my parents and grandparents as they settled permanently in Japan, I have all the benefits of being what they call a “third culture kid.” It’s a term that I disdain: as if we were protists, they’ve lumped all of us who don’t fit neatly in one “where are you from” category into a mush of miscellany. But it’s who I proudly am.

Still, in that moment on the bullet train, in that earliest stage before all the Iranian election fallout, before the ignominy of a proud nation was put on display for the whole world—in that moment, who I so proudly am suddenly felt so wrong. The ticker put my still-inadequate Japanese to the test as I figured out the Japanese characters and the news they conveyed. And then I wondered why I had to be figuring it out: in my name, in my face, in my heritage, I am Iranian, so why shouldn’t I, why couldn’t I be reading the news about my compatriots in the language of my forefathers? Why shouldn’t I have the right to be in Hamadan, watching events unfold right there where my great-grandparents once did? I knew the answer: I am a Bahá’í, a member of a persecuted religious minority. But I couldn’t help the indignation. As an Iranian myself, I have always perceived Iran from across a continent, trying to figure it out through the bits and pieces I’ve heard and seen and tasted. But never before had I felt that ambiguous role Iran has played in my life more acutely than this summer, as the relationship between Iran, the ambiguous, and myself took another turn.

Iran, the ambiguous, and myself—for me, it so beautifully, so magically, captures my relationship with my nation of origin. And it, of course, is not my brainchild. It is originally that of Yasunari Kawabata, laureate of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself” was the title of Kawabata’s Nobel Lecture. His oration is a seminal investigation of “Japaneseness” as expressed in the literary and religious heritage of his great nation, one that gave the world its first novel. Yet to the intellectually callow like me, able to claim at best a cursory appreciation of the recondite poetry and arcane Zen Theosophy, striving to understand better that poetry and theosophy here at Columbia, Kawabata’s lecture loses its erudition and becomes just a celebration of the speaker’s heritage, the aesthetic flaunt of a man entrusted with carrying, on an international stage, the proud, beautiful tradition of a millennia-old literary history.

Recognizing how laymen like me struggle with Kawabata’s thought, Kenzaburo Oe, Japan’s only other literature Nobel laureate, explores the mysterious beauty of “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself” in his own 1994 Nobel Lecture titled “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself.” Oe explains Kawabata’s oration, and then goes on, bashfully confessing that he feels “more spiritual affinity with the Irish poet William Butler Yeats” than with Kawabata. He laments that “present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity,” one the modern and Western, the other the traditional and Eastern. “I too,” he explains, “am living as a writer with this polarisation imprinted on me like a scar.”

And so am I, in my own humble way, split.

Split, like Oe, between two—or perhaps more—opposite poles of ambiguity, I feel more “spiritual affinity” with Kawabata and Oe than I do with Hafez or Ferdowsi. Or, more accurately, I feel just as much. I feel that the beauty of which Kawabata speaks is the same beauty of which Hafez and Ferdowsi write: that is, the beauty of me, the beauty of my people. And that is true beauty: knowing that all people—Iranian, Japanese, from whatever pole of ambiguity—are, in the end, my people.

Yet one still cannot and must not dismiss one’s heritage. And so that moment of polarization I felt on the bullet train will live on in me, live on until everyone, regardless of his or her sex, class, ethnicity, religion, or anything else, can return, without fear, to his or her homeland, his or her vatan. And in the meantime, here at Columbia, I soldier on, trying to figure out all this ambiguity, trying to figure out all this beauty.