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

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

“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.