The Bruising of Qilwa

by Naseem Jamnia

How many ways can you splice a history? Price a country? Dice a people? Slice a heart? Entice what’s been erased back into story? My-gritude. Have you ever taken a word in your hand, dared to shape your palm to the hollow where fullness falls away? Have you ever pointed it back to its beginning? Felt it leap and shudder in your fingers like a dowsing rod? Jerk like a severed thumb? Flare with the forbidden name of a goddess returning? My-gritude. Have you ever set out to search for a missing half? The piece that isn’t shapely, elegant, simple. The half that’s ugly, heavy, abrasive. Awkward to the hand. Gritty on the tongue. Migritude. — Shailja Patel, “How Ambi Became Paisley,” from Migritude

Did everyone in this place present themselves with only their names? How could someone look at you and assume what you wanted to be called, in a language that designated distinctions? Three weeks in Qilwa and Firuz still wasn’t used to it, kept expecting the Dilmuni introduction. Fortunately, they had heard stories, knew Kofi did not care what forms of address people used, but generally acquiesced to moving through the world as a man. “I’m they-Firuz.” Reminding themself to keep firm their grip, Firuz was dismayed at the unexpectedly limp grasp of their own clammy palm. They steeled their countenance and did not wipe their hand afterward.

“You know,” Firuz ventured, lifting the spigot to pour water into the teapot when the glug of boiling began, “they might be afraid of you.” “Afraid?” Kofi tilted his head, hand poised to pick up the baskets he’d been filling with sorted plants. “Why would they be afraid? I’m a healer, not whatever is hunting them across the sea.” Firuz flinched so hard, they nearly dropped the teapot. One thing to know the current fate of their people, another to hear the careless mention tossed out like trash to be burned.

Firuz perched atop the makeshift table, picked up Parviz’s reading material. A disgusted noise escaped them. “Really, you’re reading this garbage? Abbaass is notorious for not giving other cultures their due. All he does is celebrate our history, as if it’s only ours.”

“Is that a . . . person?” “Technically, a corpse.”

The clinic—they could do more good there than sharing what few resources they had. They had to justify it to themself this way or risk the guilt consuming them, a disease of its own.

Firuz looked from one to the other and bit back a smile. They might not have such feelings of their own—romance was not only foreign to them but completely uninteresting—but they could appreciate a spark between others.

“Energy is constantly flowing in the universe. It’s inherent. The . . . the building blocks of our world have properties that release and consume energy. When we learn magic, we’re growing the muscle, so to speak, that allows us to access this energy. Anyone can learn, but not everyone has the patience or aptitude. That’s why we use the general term magic user, but adept for those who train.”

“All energy is connected,” their mentor would say, fixated on Firuz. “Your blood is only one way to harness it. Use it and unlock the vault of the universe. Feel it to reach out into the world. Control it, and anything energetically possible is yours.”

Any machine, with enough use, broke down. A body was a complex machine fitting together thousands, if not millions, of parts; too much pressure on any one could cause a malfunction that collapsed the whole thing. A spell targeting blood, which reached every tissue, every organ—such a spell could do untold damage.

Unlike her financier, the governor was the picture of soft kindness: braided hair pulled back from her round face, a twinkle in her eye, clothes bright pink and blue and red. It seemed unimaginable that such a woman was behind the vicious laws shunting Firuz’s people into extreme poverty and pain.

“Though many of your kind neglected to go through such proper channels.” Firuz felt their smile grow icy. Your kind, as if Qilwans and Sassanians were so fundamentally different. “Fear for one’s family and own life can do that, Chamberlain. I pray you will never have to experience it.”

As they followed her, Firuz ticked through the options of where to take this conversation, how to impart their anxieties without cowing her or erasing the things that made this young teen who she was.

Puberty had taken them unawares, not because they did not know it would happen but because their body began to morph into a thing unknown, a thing untenable with their own image of themself, an image they hadn’t realized they’d held so firmly. So they’d procured the binding vest and marched to the elders, beginning alignment processes as soon as they could. Having a set of people who could help Firuz live as the person they wanted to had made all the difference, and it was fear stopping Firuz from being what those people had been to them for their brother now.

What did it mean to belong to a people who had once subjugated another before becoming subjugated themselves?

The more one fathomed a thing, the more one could control it. Magic is mostly a working of the will.

“You know death changes the body. That changes the magic.” It was why even the most powerful of blood mages couldn’t raise armies of the dead, why blood adepts trained on themselves and not on corpses.

“Firuz-jan, you cannot appreciate the dangers a tool possesses unless you are hurt by it. Only then can you learn how to use it properly to prevent such pain. How else can we promise the world we pose no threat?”

Firuz didn’t believe in the Shahbaaz’s blessing, didn’t believe in a god that hadn’t kept their people safe. But Firuz did believe in the science that was magic, and that would have to be enough.

Unable to see Afsoneh, even as they screeched for her; unable to see Kofi, even as his name echoed in their head, Firuz grabbed the energy in their blood to snap the link tethering the three of them. It felt as meaningful as abandoning one’s home to avoid a genocide, only to die in the gutters.

When I was a child, my father instilled a fierce pride about our heritage in me. The Persians, he told me, had one of the largest empires in the world, spanning through centuries and millennia. We came from those folk, as both of my parents immigrated to the United States from Iran. To be Persian was to embrace this legacy of empire with pride because despite everyone who tried to wipe us out—the Muslim Arabs, the Mongols, the British and French and Russians—we are still here. It did not occur to me to be ashamed until my second master’s program, when I sat in a postcolonial literature class and realized I was living the legacy of empire in my daily life. Having been born and raised and now studying on stolen land, with a professor whose family had been caught in India’s partition, and being one of the few people of color in the department—all of these and more made me realize the empire I had long admired could not be divorced from these modern contexts either, despite their seeming dissimilarities. It didn’t matter that Persepolis was not built by African slaves; many Black Iranians are a legacy of the other dynasties that used them. It didn’t matter that Persians had invented algebra or been the founders of modern medicine or had written one of the longest epics in world literature. What did such accomplishments mean when there were still subjugated people under our care?

What does it mean to be oppressed when you were once an oppressor?

Firuz is not a hero, and Kofi is not a villain. Their ideological clash ends in violence, as so many often do, but Firuz does not come away with the triumphant knowledge that they won. They didn’t win. As they began the story, so they conclude it: a marginalized person in a country afraid of its own recolonization.