Read Online Everything Is So Political by Sandra McIntyre - Free Book Online Page A

stories, with those two lines that made absolutely no sense but which, despite their logical impossibility sounded musical enough to start me on a night of sweet dreams and restless wondering. An itch would gnaw at the sides of my spine, and by the time the story ended, wings would spring to lift me from the shambles of reality and into a heaven of ideas. And my mother, with a slightly orange face in the shaded light of the lamp, would always tell me: “You don’t need wings to fly. All you need is your imagination. All you need is a heart full of love.” I’d stare, smitten, at the oval holes of her nostrils, at the few pinheaded black hairs on her rounded chin, which she sometimes made me tweeze, and I’d wait for her to unlock the door of my cage and release me: her lovesick nightingale.
    Dreams were for free, no one could take mine away. During the eight years of a war that orphaned children and widowed mothers, that amputated dark-skinned fathers and beheaded brothers on both sides of a vicious line called border, I ventured out of my nascent cage only when the rest of the world slept, and in the darkness of the night, free from the evils of this life, I fluttered toward the moon, and only in her light did I sleep.
    My mother was an English student whose ambition was to become a teacher. She learnt English in school, and then practiced it with an American family that had —before the Revolution— lived three blocks from our house. By the time the Shah was dethroned, our American neighbours were already back in that distant nosy country, mowing their lawns and painting their picket fences. My mother had a thing for her teacher (it runs in the family), a certain Mr. Carl who was, according to my father, a CIA agent. During the Revolution, when the Morality Police raided houses to confiscate anything that they deemed immoral (everything from playing cards to alcohol but also any pictures of scarf-less women), my mother and father dug a huge hole in our garden and buried in it all their books, magazines, and their own un-Islamic pictures. That’s how memories and knowledge were preserved in my house. They had to be smothered to stay alive.
    When, due to her unplanned pregnancy, my mother had to drop out of university, her only way of fulfilling her dream of teaching was through me: I was her only student. I learnt English very quickly, but it was years later that I perfected my pronunciation of certain words. For a long time Hawaii was Havaii, waitress was vaitress, and knife, I am ashamed to say, was ke nife.
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    My second favourite story was the story of my birth, preceded only by the story of how I was conceived, a story my mother never told me but one that I heard through the grapevine. One cannot have secrets here, not those types of secrets anyway. They were special stories because my life could have still been saved; at that time it could have gone either way. She could have had an abortion, or could have killed us both. She could have fled the country, as many people had done and were still doing. Life was playing Russian roulette with my fate, but somehow it was always my temple that faced the open mouth of a gun. And each time I made the acquaintance of a bullet, I’d realize that I never pulled the trigger once, it was never me. Someone in my life always volunteered.
    She had mistaken her contractions for mere stomach pains, and though her bags for the hospital had been laid and ready weeks in advance, she had only called my father when her water broke. “Be strong, I love you,” was what he told her before panicking and dialing random numbers and asking any woman who picked up to please help his wife. When my mother was releasing herself from nine months of carrying me, our black and white TV was standing on its wooden legs like a strange beheaded electronic animal, watching as my mother pushed me out of her and into this world, playing muted news that everyone was