When Iran Makes Headlines, Iranian Americans Find Themselves Having to Explain

This past week, we’ve gotten an education on the current regime in Iran and the mastermind, General Qassem Soleimani, who led the country's shadow war with the West.

It’s when Iran makes international headlines that Iranian Americans like me get asked by colleagues and friends what we know, and what we think might come next. Often, the answer is: I don’t know.

I appreciate being asked because it's an opportunity to hear what questions they have, and share some historical context that might help them frame current events. But the truth is that I don't follow developments in Iran as closely as someone who lives there or is fully immersed in studying it from an academic or policy perspective.

This week, as we were being bombarded with images of mass protests and missiles firing, I reached out to Persis Karim, director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. In the late 1990s, my aunt gave me her book, "A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans."

It was the first book I'd ever encountered in what's since become a popular genre about our struggles with our identities. In the case of Iranian Americans, the two identities we're labeled with are at odds in a way that can be hard to explain to those outside of the diaspora.

Getting to sit with Karim over tea in her kitchen was therapeutic. She put words to the psychological weight this week has placed on so many of us. We're asked to explain current events while carrying 40 years of baggage that we don't always acknowledge, or even realize is there.

Here's part of our conversation:

Karim: We have been affected by the news, and the way that Iran comes to us is through these rather negative news headlines. So imagine for most Americans, that's all they know. They don't have a story of eating with their grandmother or seeing their family on a Skype chat, or they don't have a memory of traveling to Iran.

We're affected by the idea that we're expected to explain things. And we don't have enough everyday experience with that. Especially you and I, who were born here. It's one thing if you went to school and you have access to Persian language media.

Part of it is we've absorbed the long, recycled playback loop of Iran in the negative. So whether we are aware of it or not, we might actually have subdued some of our own Iranian identification because all you see is negative stuff.

Jamali: I definitely feel that. My whole life has been post-hostage crisis. And the playback loop you're talking about is bombs being dropped or scary-looking religious leaders on television, and I have found I have compartmentalized that. I kind of put it in a box and leave it somewhere every day and don't really revisit it until moments like this.

Karim: So just in the last few days, I was interviewed for two television pieces.

And while I was speaking, in the background were images of bombs dropping and images of mass crowds in Iran waving their fists. And while those events might be taking place there, they're superimposed with me speaking. So suddenly, I feel like I'm in the playback loop along with those images, which are the same images of 40 years ago.

And that, I think, is something that we don't know the psychological effect of. But it's a way in which we are neither here nor there — that we are not fully American and we're certainly not Iranian.

And so we are in the in-between. So how can we tell a more complicated, nuanced human story that is not the reduction of news headlines and images of bombs and mass protests, of angry people in Iran. How can we tell that story?

How we can tell it is by giving voice to the diversity that exists among Iranians. There are Jews. There are Christians. There are Muslims. There are Bahá'ís. There are old people. There are young people. There are students who came here post 2009. There are people who are fleeing Iran. There are people who, you know, have gone back and forth, who still feel like Iran is their home. The other part of it that I think is so important, that is lost in all of this, is the generosity of spirit, the warmth, the hospitality of Iranians.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.