“He’s hypnotized you,” Mom said when I told her I was going to marry the Iranian and move to his country. “Do you have any idea how they treat women in Islamic countries?”
I regarded her through narrowed eyes because my mother, who considered Raman noodles foreign, had zero understanding of different cultures. She wasn’t as vocal as Dad with her prejudice, but she wasn’t far behind him on the redneck spectrum.
The heels of her miniature pumps clicked angrily across the linoleum as she cleared away the last half-eaten plate of beans and franks left on the counter, then shoved a loaf of WonderBread around like a pint-sized bully. “You just have to be different, don’t you? You just have to be a rebel.” Reaching under the sink, she took out a can of Lysol, sprayed the area in front of her with a misty burst of pine, and then slammed the can down.
It was right there, I suppose, as she drew her can of air freshener at the OK Corral, that I decided there was no going back on my position: the Iranian and his country were going to be the best things for me since the invention of air.
Contrary to what my mother believed, I wasn’t by nature audacious. If anything I was an aimless thing fueled by anger. A blind girl with a cane frothing at the mouth. Like so many young people, my sole driving force was to be unique, to be different from my folks.
Mom, the quintessential Good Girl from Kathryn, North Dakota. The rule follower. Who watched life safely from the sidelines. Who felt vindicated each time someone stuck his or her neck out and got slammed.
Dad, the angry farm boy. Who railed against the Coons, Kikes, and Slant Eyes. Who pined incessantly for the small town where he was from. Who, like his father before him, ate meat and potatoes, drank Schlitz, and smoked unfiltered Camels cigarettes.
The Iranian, a graduate student then, appeared to be everything my parents were not: exotic, adventurous, confident, and sophisticated. What I refused to see— thanks to my standoff with Mom, thanks to my insistence that I follow any path that my parents would not— was that he promised to be a lot of other things as well. It didn’t occur to me that someone who’d been raised in a tiny Iranian village might not be the best match for me. It didn’t dawn on me that a country famous for a hostage crisis, and an Islamic Revolution, and a dour Ayatollah, and an 8-year war with Iraq might offer “interesting” challenges.
It took awhile to recognize that moving to Iran had been a tactical error.
I'd disregarded the posted travel advisory at the entrance of the passport office:a big, yellow warning sign that said, in effect: Do not expect the U.S. State Department to rescue you if you are stupid enough to travel to Libya, Iran, or Syria. And the bearded customs official who relieved me of my American passport when I entered the country. I was, from that point on, officially an extension of my Iranian husband. I couldn’t get a job, leave the country, or God knows what else without receiving his written permission.
But then I spent the next five years wrestling with an army of invasive in-laws, a husband trapped between two worlds, and the requirements of an infamously restrictive culture. Instead of leading that promised life of high adventure—camping with Bedouins, exploring the tombs of Alexander the Great and Darius III— I spent my days alone, in a dumpy dorm room, with a baby and Frank, a six-inch cockroach that crawled out of my toilet.
I came to recognize the undeniable precariousness of the life I had chosen. I witnessed a whole host of women lose so much of what they loved—their homes, their kids, and their sanity. I spotted the setup for disaster in my own married life. What, I wondered, had ever allowed me to think, even for a minute, that trouble couldn’t befall me? My demise, I sensed, would come from out of nowhere, totally unpredictable. Like a rogue wave, a titanic force I’d be powerless to control.
A little wiser, a little worse for the wear, I eventually came home.
But what do you know when you’re young and dumb?
I was listening to a speech on TED recently in which JK Rowling , in a commencement address, said, “It is impossible to live and not fail unless you live so cautiously that you might as well have not lived at all. Then you fail by default.”
Of course I thought of my mother, who I judge to have failed at life by default. So afraid to make a mistake, she’d played it safe. Home alone watching reruns of Scrubs. Sewing on quilts. Playing dominos once a week. Wringing her hands as acquaintances buy the farm.
But I also thought of my daughter. Freshly graduated from college. Venturing out into the great big world. On her own. Making critical choices. Despite her having far more aim, far more purpose then I ever did at that stage in life, some of her plans don’t seem sensible from a mother's perspective. Living in Cairo on a grant, for instance, despite the Middle East implosion.
A chip off the old block, my daughter will wind up suffering because, as Rowling notes, it’s impossible to avoid. Being young and dumb, she has no way of measuring what she stands to lose. She has no idea what questions she ought to ask. There are some things she wasn't raised to understand.
And yes, now that I’m walking in my mother's moccasins, I empathize with her.
I often wonder if I’m still the same reckless girl of my youth. Not so much angry, now, as oblivious to consequence. Not so much experience-hungry, as blindly trusting. Willing to trot after my man into the unknown just because he sells it as a grand adventure, like it’s really no big deal. Willing to dismiss the evidence of danger—the best-selling books, the movies, the documentaries, the photo-spreads—that give pause to rational people.
Like finding myself on Mt. McKinley with Walt. Balanced on a knife’s edge. 3000-foot drops on either side. The wind whipping. Clothes snapping like a superhero’s cape. The burden of an 80-pound pack. Body quaking. Viscerally aware that, with one false move, I could plunge to my death. Wondering how the hell I got talked into doing something so downright dangerous.
Or taking scuba diving lessons instead of lying on the beach. Jumping into the ocean, way off shore, with a 25-year-old, French-speaking dive master. So laid back he probably eats marijuana for breakfast. Face to face with my biggest fear—a shark. Not only staying in the water, Jaws’ theme music playing, but swimming after the thing.
Who does shit like that?
It was on this beach, in between diving with hammerheads and questioning my motivation for doing so, that I opened up the book I’d brought, Little Bee . A gorgeous novel written by a Brit named Chris Cleave. The story of two women—a young African and an Englishwoman— whose lives collide on a Nigerian beach one fateful day.
I marveled at the book from a writer’s perspective— its structure, use of metaphor, spot on dialogue, and building of tension. (I just love the opening line: “Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl.”) Yet it was the English character that got me thinking some more about recklessness, motivation, failure, and the price of our mistakes.
Sarah has found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Married to a man she’s not sure she loves, dissatisfied with suburban life, questioning her career, armed with a pair of free airline tickets, she’d been too busy running from her troubles to consider the wisdom of her holiday destination. Too interested in escaping the mundane, and seeking the novel.
It should never have happened, of course, in the ordinary run of things. There are countries of the world, and regions of one’s own mind, where it is unwise to travel. I have always thought so, and I have always struck myself as a sensible woman. Independent of mind, but not recklessly so….Clever me, I went on holiday somewhere different. That season in Nigeria there was an oil war.
And like I had in Iran, it is only when Sarah faces a situation outside of her normal purview—coming face to face with two young African girls and the soldiers who want to kill them— that she recognizes how ill equipped she is to help herself, let alone anybody else. She is designed to handle the challenges of her home environment, not the incomprehensible circumstances she finds on some third-world beach.
But I didn’t understand. Three days earlier, just before we left for Heathrow, I had been standing on a bare concrete slab in our garden, asking Andrew exactly when the hell he planned to build his bloody glasshouse there. That was the biggest issue in my life—that glass house, or the lack of it…I was a modern woman and disappointment was something I understood better than fear.
The problem is, and this is what you don’t get when you’re young, or reckless, some mistakes have too big a price tag associated with them. Some mistakes just can’t be taken back. Some mistakes change everything. And generally not for the good. Half naked on a beach before a band of murderers, a hair’s breadth from being gang raped, Sarah considers, for the first time, the precariousness of the position she’s placed herself in.
I was wearing a very small green bikini. I will say that again and maybe I will begin to understand it myself. In the contested area of an African country in the middle of a three-way oil war, because there was a beach next to the war, because the state tourist board had mail-merged tickets for that beach…I was wearing a very small green bandeau biking from Hermes. It occurred to me, as I stood there with my arms crossed over my tits, that I had freeloaded myself to annihilation.
I was talking about these ideas, what point I wanted to make, on my morning run with Walt. The notion of recklessness versus adventurousness, of playing it safe versus being plain dumb, of failure by default versus failure by experiment. About the stupid mistakes that have damaged us the most. And we agreed that the thing about life is that none of us gets away unscathed. We all suffer loss. We all fail. We all get betrayed. We all betray. We all die.
Some of us plummet from a mountaintop.
Or get eaten by a shark.
Some of us die in a car accident, like one of Walt’s friends, out on Route 44.
It comes down to this one question: While you’re here, what kind of person do you want to be? Knowing that no matter what you do, no matter how well you hide, you’re eventually going to get nailed?
Sara is changed by her horrific encounter in Africa. The woman who flew off on holiday is not the same one who returns. Such is the way with all good novels. Such is the way of life.
My experience in Iran, as troubling as much of it was, provided me a priceless education. It changed who I was. I grew up. I made life-long friends. I discovered my strengths. I faced my weaknesses. I found the courage to take the car keys of my life back, to take charge of my self.
Not so different from climbing mountains, and diving in the ocean. Lots of discomfort mixed with incredible beauty. Had I stayed home where it was “safe,” I wouldn’t be this woman I am today. To not evolve into someone different by the time I'm sixty will mean I have failed.
What would I choose for my own identity-seeking daughter? A life of safety like her Grandmother? To never learn who she is by trial?
Or one in which she takes on the Arab world half-cocked? To risk God knows what?
The answer is obvious for someone like me.
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot
