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

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Count the times books have been burned in piles by the fearful and the infirm, men and women allergic to inquiry. Memorization is our only recourse against loss.

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.

It is our duty to remember that history’s unfinished business will recycle itself. I remembered: The only way to remain one step ahead of death is to cultivate our ability to sniff the bloodthirsty past before it approaches to settle old scores.

This is perfectly in keeping with American foreign policy, in my humble opinion, which seems to subscribe to the following mission: Interfere with and profit from far-flung governments at the peril of their citizens, and once those poor, unfortunate souls have been dispatched to the Four Corners of the World, in exile and on their knees, offer a scattering of them asylum and a compensatory education.

Besides, why should I keep my wisdom, hard-earned in the trenches of literature, to myself when I could be providing him with ground-breaking perspective?

“And who are we?” he inquired, his mustache still dark with youth. “Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists,” I answered.

“Pitiless persecutors!” I said, thinking of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, the King of Kings, Bush. “This is not the end of them. The fascists will keep reconstituting themselves!” I declared, and tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I felt as though I had been fused to that delirium of rocks. Had I made it back to Iran? I wondered. To that mercurial country of my youth? My mind was unreeling. My thoughts were spooling, spilling over. And what, according to my father, was so vile about Iran? How, I wondered, could he have considered it worse than Spain with its rampant colonialism, its inquisitions, a country with centuries’ worth of blood on its hands? And what about the so-called New World? How had we ended up there, caught up in its lies and dissociations? The New World, I thought, a direct extension of the Spanish and the British imperialists? We, whose lives had been shaped by the interests of the British, had returned to live among their descendents in the New World, to be pulverized again and again by them.

I wondered: What would the greatest revenge be? I scanned the limpid, wind-polished sky. I saw the answer, which had presented itself to me in so many forms and facets throughout the Grand Tour of Exile and against which I, fearful and uncertain, had repeatedly thrown myself only to be repelled, as if it had been written across that sky in ink. The greatest revenge, I saw, lay in the simplest revenge of all: to love against all odds, to prevail, to persist in a world that fought tooth and nail to eliminate me. That’s all there was. That’s all there ever had been. I stood there utterly dumbfounded. How stupid, I thought, how utterly simple.