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

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Our family emblem, inspired by Sumerian seals of bygone days, consists of a clay cylinder engraved with three As framed within a circle; the As stand for our most treasured roles, listed here in order of importance: Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists. The following motto is engraved underneath the cylinder: In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths.

But we believe our duty is to persevere against a world hell-bent on eliminating the few who dare to sprout in the collective manure of degenerate humans.

Search the world east to west, north to south; nowhere will you find a shortage of tyrants, all expertly trained to sniff out weak prey.

Every one of us in Iran is a hybrid individual best described as a residue of a composite of fallen empires.

The core of the matter, the point of this notable monologue, is to expose the artful manipulation of historical time through the creation of false narratives rendered as truth and exercised by the world’s rulers with expert precision for hundreds of years.

Now that you have heard the story of our cruel fate, you are ready to listen to the Hosseini Commandments, a text that has three giant heads that you must make part of your own.

FIRST COMMANDMENT: Ecce homo: This is man, destined to suffer at the hands of two-faced brethren inclined to loot the minds and bodies of friend and foe. Ill-fated child, trust nobody and love nothing except literature, the only magnanimous host there is in this decaying world.

SECOND COMMANDMENT: Like a gored bull, history is charging through the world in search of fresh victims. Think! Does a gored bull run straight? No. It zigzags. It circles around itself. It is bleeding and half-blind. Be warned: The world’s numbskull intellectuals, which form 99.9 percent of all intellectuals, will feed you lies. History, they will say, is linear, and time continuous.

THIRD COMMANDMENT: We Hosseinis—Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists—are expert connoisseurs of literature and therefore capable of taking a narrative apart and putting it back together faster than a wounded man can say “Ah!” This talent, passed on to you by your honorable ancestors, is your sword. Draw it anytime you need to strike stupidity in the face.

Ill-fated child, when your time comes, you must dive headfirst into the swampy lagoons of our pitiful human circumstances and, after roving the depths, emerge with the slimy pearl of truth. Be warned: The truth is ugly, wretched, full of craters and holes through which rise the fumes of death. Most men, smug and cowardly, will turn their noses away from its stench. Sooner or later, you will have to engage with these men; you will have to persevere despite their private delusions and collective ignorance.

my mother—a woman with strong legs and a sweet disposition—would remind my father, Abbas Abbas Hosseini, that he had been accused by the Iranian intelligentsia of being “a passive traitor whose nose was hooked into books while others’ were being rubbed in the blood of their brethren.” Bibi Khanoum, my father informed me, would say: “Don’t test your luck, Abbas! People don’t like to be snubbed while they’re being martyred for their beliefs.”

A year after the war broke out, the few remaining intellectuals who hadn’t been jailed or fled the country with false papers declared my father a clairvoyant truth teller. But my father—Autodidact, Anarchist, Atheist, whose character they had previously assassinated—refused to have his moment in the sun.

Instead, he and my mother, Bibi Khanoum, ran for the hills. She was pregnant with me, and my father had suffered enough loss to last him a lifetime.

But they survived it and took shelter in that stone house in Nowshahr, near the Caspian Sea, which was built as a sanctuary by my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini, who referred to the house as either the Censorship ...

Months later, in 1982, I was born in the heart of the Oasis of Books, the library, which was designed in the shape of an egg and built around a date palm that shot to the sky through an opening in the roof. My mother leaned against the trunk of the tree and pushed. I—a gray-faced, black-eyed baby—slipped out of her loins into a room lined with dusty tomes, into a country seized by war. I immediately popped a date in my mouth to sweeten the blow. My parents looked down at me, grinning with hope. I learned to crawl, walk, read, write, shit, and eat in that library. Even before I could read, I nurtured my brain by running my hands along the spines of all the old books and licking their soot off my fingers.

Once I was old enough to walk, I paced in concentric circles like a Sufi mystic, masticating dates and muttering the family motto to myself: In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths.

The days passed. My education unfolded in the midst of the interminable war.

Very impressive following paragraph.

At the end of each lesson, as bedtime neared, my father stiffly ordered: “Ill-fated child, assimilate and regurgitate!”

He taught me the long-lost skill of memorization.

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.

I remember my mother once walked into the oval library, where she had given birth to me, with her apron tied around her waist and her face moist from the kitchen steam, to scorn my father: “Abbas, you are raising this child to be a boy! How will she survive in the world? Who will marry her?” My father reproached her: “These are times of war and you are worried about marriage?”

Female narrator!

Now, Rodents, let us ask: What is the purpose of a flicker of light in the midst of all that bloodshed? Easy. To illuminate the magnitude of the surrounding darkness.

!!!

I felt as though someone had taken a rolling pin to my heart, razing it and extinguishing its warmth.

Mother dies in preceding paragraph.

Then those crucial four words of the first Hosseini Commandment, which my father had whispered to me upon my birth, trumpeted through my void: Love nothing except literature.

He would say, his voice breaking, that the lesser men on this earth are the most powerful and that we, the ill-fated, must draw from scant reservoirs, plumb the depths of our singed minds and hearts, just to find the courage to survive in this world that acts against us with such violence. Worse than violence, he would say, is the indifference of those who watch the destruction of others and remain unmoved by it.

Oh so true!

But while we continued on, our ass, in still another tragedy, died of exhaustion.

My father, unusually lighthearted, stood over the animal’s body and saluted him. “Good-bye, dear Rocinante!” he said, as if our ass had been Don Quixote’s infamously weak horse. He knew how much I loved the trials and tribulations of that Knight of the Sad Countenance.

Love that book!

One morning, as we sat huddled together at the center of a cluster of trees, my father said rather conclusively of my mother: “The whole world is a mind. Her mind has been absorbed back into the mind of the universe.”

The closer we came to the border, the more dead bodies we found: dissidents who had tried to flee but who had frozen to death, Saddam’s victims. We were north of the front. His men must have been aiming with their rectal holes, killing anything with a pulse.

What a turn of phrase.

As I listened to him speak, I was reminded of the second Hosseini Commandment: 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.

True.

“Remember,” he would say during those dawn lessons, pacing back and forth before a pile of icy rocks, “literature reveals the lies and the hypocrisy of the world. It is the only true record. After I am gone, you will be the last remaining scribe of the future.”

After a long, thoughtful pause, he would artfully say: “Repeat after me: Memorize! Regurgitate! Transmit!”

There was a terrible silence as we stood there surveying the land surrounding us. I wondered if I would ever lay eyes on that land again. Then my father spat on the rocky ground, and said: “I spit on you, you bunch of patriarchal nepotists!” His face, ordinarily wafer-thin, puffed up with rage and grew red. It looked like a swelling pool of blood. I had never seen this side of him before. I felt an odd terror.

The wind beat the taut sheet of my heart as if it were a drum. It hammered and beveled that sheet until it was in tatters.

Another nice phrase.

My heart folded over itself like an envelope, but I said nothing.

I felt lonely, cut off from my father, ugly, wretched, as pitiful as a soiled manuscript forgotten in a damp trench.

I looked at the leveled city, which is known as the Pearl of the East. No bigger lie has ever been uttered. Its remains shone like copper wires in the winter sun. The Pearl of the East! Let those who want to lie to themselves lie to themselves, I thought. I remembered the slimy pearl of truth: remorseless, monstrous, and full of a terrible stench.

See p. 9.

As forlorn as I was, I would never leap off the edge of this New World, this land of thieves, with my back to a conglomeration of fake cloisters that have been dismantled from real French abbeys and reassembled here. As if the Old World were a mausoleum. What a laughable lack of perspective.

Lead-colored waves were scraping the metallic underbelly of the sky.

I was certain that this mail was just another way for the New World to shed its white guilt while simultaneously exploiting Iran’s ousted intelligentsia. 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.

But unlike me, the man is fixated on the color red. He wears red slacks, a red button-down, a red tweed suit jacket, red socks. The only contrast comes from his shoes, which are brown.

There is a reason for this.

I told him I was in need of a mentor, and then I provided him with a few basic coordinates of my life. I exposed the nature of my relationship to books. I told him that my ill-fated ancestors and I had survived death through our intimate engagement with literature. Then, I thought to myself, engagement is too mild a word, so I replaced it with refuge. I said: “We, the ill-fated, have taken refuge in literature.” But this description also failed to communicate a sufficient level of intensity.

With a hint of violence, I added: “Hear me! We have pitched our tattered tents in the dark forests of literature!”

He said, “They can’t fire me if I do. They’ve tried many times to eradicate my presence from this campus. Communism is still treated as a crime in this country. Every year they ask me to sign a paper that says, I, José Emilio Morales, am not a Communist. I have never signed it, but still I wear red every day to get back at them for that piece of paper.”

Now we know.

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

Though he agreed to test my memorization skills during our weekly meetings, he was quick to follow up with a countercondition.

Interesting passage follows.

“In contradistinction to the New Poets—literary attachés to the master of fine arts in poetry, a pair of disengaged numbskulls who lazily read with their eyes—I, outsider and literary terrorist in training, read not with my eyes but with my consciousness, scanning the stratified layers embedded in each text like an archaeologist in an excavation site!”

The start of a great manifesto.

A vain search that turned up nothing, because no matter where you go, knot-brained idiots outnumber honest and straightforward men.

Oh too true.

I observed him, I felt a sharp pain in my chest. This pain, I believe, derived from the sudden and unexpected loosening of the screws that kept the lid on my past tightly shut. I was faced with the prospect of having to open that lid in order to fit my father in the same container I had relegated not only my mother to but also the senseless phenomena that had accumulated during the course of my ill-fated life. I was sure those forgotten fragments of memory, sharpened into spears on the jagged cliffs of time, would inevitably slip out and stab me in the gut. I had no doubt that upon my father’s death I would enter a labyrinth of grief so complex that I may never find the exit.

So well written!