Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Trip Across the Mediterranean

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

I was taught to know the languages of the oppressed and the oppressors because, according to my father, and to my father’s father, and to his father before that, the wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next.

Ill-fated child, trust nobody and love nothing except literature, the only magnanimous host there is in this decaying world. Seek refuge in it. It is through its missives alone that you will survive your death, preserve your inner freedom.

For this we will always be persecuted: for pointing our fingers and asking, Is this a man?

Literature, as my father would say, is a nation without boundaries. It is infinite. There are no stations, no castes, no checkpoints.

“It could have been worse. At least she was buried in her homeland. There is nothing worse than dying a stranger.”

Worse than violence, he would say, is the indifference of those who watch the destruction of others and remain unmoved by it. With what little conviction he could muster, he would remind me that it was our job to resist the tyranny of hate and its behavior of choice: the elimination of others.

Every day, before we rested from our night’s hike, he instructed me to sit on a pile of rocks that jetted out of the brightly glazed snow, and said, “Life crushes us, grinds us to a halt, wears us down.”

I closed my eyes and inhaled his words. I swallowed them as if they were food to my stomach. I felt nurtured by literature’s web of sentences, connected through them to this strange and dark universe.

Like a good pickle, I was soaking in the brine of death.

I took turns cracking each book open to a random page as if it were an oracle. There were certain sentences that delivered an electric pulse and momentarily brought him back to life. It worked like a charm. There was no denying it: There are units of language that have a mysterious aura about them, a metaphysical force. Encouraged, I got to my feet and walked in circles around my father like an old peripatetic Greek. Better yet, like an old Sufi mystic, the way I had walked in that oval library as a child.

I felt as though he had ironed out the wrinkled sheet of my heart.

I took pleasure in lifting the book to my nose. I picked up mild tones of sage, black olives, nicotine.

I was struck then by a thought of epic proportions: Texts have been leaping across eras for centuries in order to cross-contaminate one another.

Books, I realized, are connected to one another via nearly invisible superhighways of language, the way stars are interrelated via light and dust, the debris of the universe.

The book is, in principle, the world and the world is the book.

It was as if the edges of my paper heart were being folded and torn at the seams.

There must have been a full moon causing the tides of my mind to rise to unprecedented heights.

The past, I concluded, contains within it a trace of the future. That trace acts as a conveyor belt through which certain images can be experienced as visions in advance of their time.