Preface &
Home Proxy Home

Home Proxy Home (excerpt)

The scraggly guy who enters the ATM lobby after me and waits on a bench tells me it’s a Georgian thing that the young woman in a crop top and high-waisted white jeans stands at my back talking loudly on her phone and looking over my shoulder as I’m trying to transact.

She doesn’t budge despite me turning around to mime you are crowding me, please step back. She was in the same position with the man at the ATM before me, so I thought they were together and I was confused when she didn’t leave with him. I spread my body to crowd her back and turn to tell the guy that I’ve been coming to this lobby for a few months and nothing like this Georgian thing has happened. But that it would make sense: a doctor I saw at the clinic in Tbilisi told me to undress and just stood there with her nurse glaring at me arms crossed and grinning. In the US, they leave the room, give you time and a paper vest, then knock before entering.

He asks where I’m from. I say isn’t it obvious since I’ve just demanded space. In English no less. He says no. I say I’m from America. He says he wants to go there one day. It’s usual for me to hear this abroad. Everybody is USA USA WOW California! I want to say it’s not what you think it is, but I don’t. You should go! Are you Georgian? No, I’m Ukrainian.

Oh shit. I should have known from his slouch. Here in Georgia thousands of refugees from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia mingle. A gift of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started in February 2022. He had that āvāreh آواره vibe [I’ll get into this later]. Light of possessions, untethered, in limbo, allāf علاف or bikār بیکار, a drifter floating in the wind.

He translates on my behalf. A grievance from an American to a Georgian by a Ukrainian in Russian. Crop-top girl scowls and huffs out not too long after.

The Ukrainian is kind of cute. Plus we’ve bonded. I step out and wait on the front steps staring at my phone as he finishes his transaction. He says he is from a war-torn city and, yes, a refugee. He doesn’t know if he can go to USA. I say why not through Mexico. Ah the black way he says. I ask if he’s OK here in Georgia. He says yeah sure OK, he’s been here before but overall not OK. A variation on what the Iranians here in Georgia say when I ask if they are happy. Iranians leaving that religious dictatorship for a better life were allowed in for a brief time in 2015. Now they are pestered at the border of a land that used to be part of their nation before the Qajar kings ceded the territories to Russia in the nineteenth century following years of war. I want to talk more but it’s awkward and he’s on his way so that’s that. Good luck with everything. What else can I do but hope he was able to get money from the machine. He says he’s going to Europe to make his way to USA—I’ll make it one day.

As the Ukrainian exits right, in walks from the left a little old man with a fisherman’s cap and a small accordion around his neck. I immediately snap a few stealthy photos, my favorite way to use my phone. At the corner he starts to play and sing. What a song. What a scene. I’m still only around the corner from my apartment, not having made much progress on my errands. It’s an old song of longing. His voice is slight. The intersection is loud. I leave coins and gesture if I can record him. The slightest nod. I don’t even know what language he sings in. We make eye contact as he keeps repeating the song for me. I’m teary-eyed.

This is happening in Saburtalo, my for-now neighborhood in Tbilisi, in this strange and unfamiliar world I sort of belong to after three months here. It’s Father’s Day in the US. I interpret this scene as the poetry of me missing my father, whom I don’t see often enough.

I’m here to get as close to home as I can. Home. That word of words for immigrants, expats, refugees, āvārehs (آواره meaning displaced, stateless, exiled, homeless, nomad, someone with an incurable longing and unbelonging in the psyche and soul).

The first three decades of my thirty-nine years away from my mother- and fatherland I was pretty fine assimilating. Hell, I was born in the West. But more and more I’m consumed by Iran, that sitting cat. All the cities I haven’t known. All the places I could have seen. All the people I could have been.

My voluntary self-exile though: I minimize risk by avoiding entry into chaos. Though every place has its troubles. But the gash in me is growing. I search endlessly for Tehran, my childhood city, by now mythical to me. The way Tbilisi, or Teflis as I knew it in childhood, was. And now I’m here in old Teflis.

As I age and consider the second half or maybe the last third of my life, I want retreat. Abdication from the society of jackals. To sequester myself in a pastoral Eden on a land of my own. Away from people and concerns of career and fame. But I don’t know where that home could be. My partner and I could never agree on where to buy a house. Here, my Georgian friend grew up in several family homes he still visits. He is a father and cohabitates peacefully with his mother. His uncle tells him to return to their ancestral village home in the hills to tend the vineyard with him. My friend says home is where he feels like a baby. And strong. Which is why he could never live abroad. I envy him this feeling. I feel allāf. Ungrounded. In limbo between San Francisco, a Tehran I don’t go to, Tbilisi, and many other places. Where to pitch that tent.

Because of my voluntary exile from Iran, I visit the lands in proximity to her: Georgia and Armenia. Once part of the greater Persian empire, these lands have ancient ruins built on the bones of my ancestors. I don’t know why that is so important. In the end the globe is one ancient ball and we're all dust. But the DNA is a zombie marching home.

After three months of finding many Tehrans in Tbilisi, a city of sycamore-lined streets just like Tehran, I travel south to Yerevan, Armenia. It too is full of sycamores.

I’m here for one reason.

My driver picks me up. We awkwardly walk to his dusty old Toyota Camry. When he puts my grimy red carry-on into his trunk I notice a stained pillow and blanket. The back seat doesn’t appear to have a working seat belt. I fuss and say I can’t drive in a car without a seat belt. I’ve already alienated the situation. He pulls over to cancel the ride but I have a mission.

The gods have sent me an Armenian-Iranian to take me to the Armenian/Iranian border. My driver is a salt-of-the-earth middle-aged man of no pretenses and easy disposition. As a young man he moved to the US from Iran for a few years but found the dog-eat-dog too taxing so he came to Armenia. He is my brother-in-arms. Well into the ride we have broken the tension. He says in Persian, your own land is something else. He is talking about Iran. He’s lived in Armenia for thirty years, but he’d go back to Iran if it ever became free.

Another way Iranians say this is
مملکت نداریم or مملکت نیست
We don’t have a country, or This is no country (for us).

I don’t care about sights on the way south. I just want to be driven so I can take in the landscape, the topography of my own dust.

The road south is mountainous. First we have a clear view of Mount Ararat and Little Ararat next it. This mountain of the Armenian Highland, the national symbol of Armenia, is now just on the other side of the nearby Turkish border. Tourists pose with Ararat looming in the background on a platform with a carved-out opening designed exactly for this memento. The lesser Caucasus are rolling hills within hills, at times downy green, at times velvety fawn dappled with trees. We two Caucasians ascend to a series of mountains called Zangezur. The region was ceded to Russia by Qajar Iran in 1813 via the Treaty of Gulistan. We stop at bell towers and my driver tells me these bells were tolled to herald approaching enemy forces, hence the name: Zang meaning “bell,” e meaning “of,” and Zur meaning “force." The bells of war. The landscape is bright green with little yellow wildflowers and large rectangular patches of purple wildflowers. I see people up to their waists in one of the distant patches. Reminded me of the lavender fields of Provence in the south of France whose tiny roads I drove through in my large white Ford the previous summer.

Summer 2021, just when international travel had opened up again after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to be over. I traveled back to southern France thirty-seven years after I had been a high-school student there. I was returning with trepidation of the same estrangement and non-whiteness I had then, a brown girl with bushy eyebrows and post-pubescence kinky hair fleeing the Islamic Republic of Iran—that had recently transmogrified from its chic and glorious past of the Shah years—for America, Shangri-la.

In the US, I have been a hyphen, an other. But who and what I encountered in the summer of 2021 was a revelation. I remember exactly the moment I became (an) American. I was sitting in a regional branch of the BNP, Banque Nationale de Paris. The supposedly bilingual young man with a little office who should have been able to answer banking-101 questions, or so I thought, could not. In neither of our two languages—OK one language, his half English and my half French, and one translation app—between us.

I don’t know if being outraged at his substandard “customer service” was just my personal strategy for preemptively covering up my own discomfort with being yet again a foreigner, or if it was being accustomed to a certain level of service and the American the-customer-is-always-right ethos—which dwindles as Americans can’t actually live on working wages—or puffery from the general reverence bestowed upon me as an American when abroad, or just my intolerance of ineptitude. But here I was, Miss Demanding American.

And I loved her.
The American.

Here in Georgia and Armenia, where I speak none of the languages, I can tell people deride my demandingness. Under their breath or outright: the American this, the American that, eyes rolling—آمریکاییه.

But I don’t care—yes, I care, I hate the scrutiny and contempt, I hate standing out, I hate being a fool in a fishbowl—I do dress like all-American Ali MacGraw in Love Story: crisp white jeans, navy blue short-sleeved T-shirt, clean brown hair. I’m Jackie-O strong.

I enjoy a privilege abroad I never have in the US. You take it where you can.

Twelve harrowing hours of driving through misty mountain passes dodging trucks that carry goods back and forth between Iran and Russia. One overnight stay in a hellish motel with vagrant men. And thirty minutes skirting the Armenian/Iranian border where the cretinous and ruthless border police make me delete all my sneaky photos of the barren toxic dump that the area is, a stinking toilet of splattered shit, nearly confiscating my phone and US passport.

The border mountains are stony and bone-dry. The atmosphere is apocalyptic. I narrowly escape. We backtrack. Behind a rusty metal shed and some burnt-out car parts at the foot of an electric barbed-wire fence my driver and I scrape some earth from this borderland.

But what difference does this earth make. I even forget the plastic bag in his trunk.