By Siamak Vossoughi
Featured Image: “Mirage in the Sky” by Gina Gidaro

Dear Yara,

I figure you ought to know something about the year you went from two to three, and how I would go quiet sometimes when we were playing or reading or walking somewhere together. Some days I’d see the kids in Gaza in you and I’d take the moment we were in and hold it as the last moment one of them had before being killed. I’d breathe through it, telling myself to do two things, as evenly as I could, fifty-fifty: Stay in the moment with you, because you deserved that. And recognize it was true, that each one of them had, in the moments just before, been just as alive as the aliveness in you. And something would happen to the moment with you then. It would hold all of who you were, and I would come as close as I could to touching that. I’d get as close as I could to understanding the thing the mothers and fathers there had lost.  Keep breathing, keep breathing, I’d tell myself. As big as the feeling of the death of children was, it was important to stay small. It was wonderful to stay small with you, because there was plenty that was still big. There would be days that year when I would be reading about Gaza just before you came home from daycare with your mother, and it would seem like a long way to travel to go from where children were dying to playing with you, but when I got it right, it wasn’t a long way at all. It was love both ways. If those children deserved to live, then let’s you and me see what kind of funny business Blue Bunny and Ruffles the Dog can get up to. Those children were in our games all that year. They were there because I was thinking that someday I would tell you about them the same way I was telling you stories of the animals who were lining up for school. I didn’t know when that would be. This was also the year that you started having nightmares. You’d wake up early and tell us that a scary monster had been chasing you. I would quietly admire your ability to articulate your fear. But I’d wonder too if you were getting it from me. I’d wonder if you could tell the way I was carrying around the kids I was reading about at the same time that I was playing with you. If you were, that seemed like a decent way to start having nightmares. I remember when I was nine and the men who I’d learned had tortured my father in prison in Iran replaced monsters in my dreams. I said goodbye to monsters then. Now you were saying hello to them, but your bravery made me wonder if you knew the world could be worse.  That year we tried to let you in on it as carefully as we could. Back in November, we went to a family peace march on Beacon Hill, led by Jewish Voices for Peace. We taught you what peace meant. There were kids there holding up signs saying Stop Bombing Children. I knew you might be one of them in a few years, and I didn’t mind that I’d have to tell you about war by then. It was the same as sharing a lot of beautiful things with you that day, like the view of the Cascade Mountains from the top of the hill and the circle of people gathered outside the library. I thought about how to have the right balance between anger and sadness when I told you. I looked forward to your anger because there is a time in a person’s life when anger can rightly feel like strength, and five, six, seven, or eight is right about in that sweet spot. It’s because anger is likely to be an appropriate feeling at that age, at least the kind that’s just discovered the foolishness or ugliness of the world. But I looked forward to your sadness too, because sadness carried me farther than anger did. There were more stories to come out of it for me. There was more singing too. I thought about how I was going to have to pay close attention to how sadness or anger helped or got in the way when you learned about war and everything else, but the nice thing was knowing that if I ever wasn’t sure which one you needed, I could always ask.

And yet there was always going to be a secret part of it too, something between you and the world, something that no amount of carefulness could mediate. I could tell you how it was for me, how I would watch those boys on television who looked like me back when I was a kid, the ones throwing rocks at tanks, and I would feel I was one of them, and then I would go to school and talk with my Jewish friends, and I’d see it was possible to be a boy who sided with tanks. I could tell you about how I wrote about Palestine once in my high school newspaper, and I was reported to the school administration because I didn’t mention that the Palestinians who’d recently been killed were human shields. I could tell you all that, and I could tell you with love, and I think about how I’ll be introducing you to the loneliness of caring about Palestinian life in America. I’ll try to also tell you that it’s not lonely in the world, but it’s hard to see that far when you’re a kid. I drew a lot of strength from my particular kind of loneliness when I was young, learning from my father about what America had done to our country and to so many countries, while still wanting to be a part of America somehow when I stepped out the door. Most of that loneliness was good, but some of it could have used a little company too. I hope I can do that for you. I hope I don’t ask you to hold anything more than you can hold. I hope you don’t make your loneliness a foundation of who you are, the way I did for a while back there.

I wish that along with learning everything I did from my father, he and I had found a way to just be sad together. But he was letting me in on the world as it was, and I wanted to show that I could face it. Between a boy and his father, I don’t know why anger accomplishes that more than sadness does, but it does. I think it’s because sadness looks like you are asking why, and there was a while there when neither of us wanted to look like we were doing that.

It’s funny though, when I got a little older, your grandfather got very good at asking why. Maybe he trusted me by then. It felt awfully good to hear him ask me why the world was the way that it was because I could hold it by then. There are some people whose sorrows don’t feel like a burden to carry because they give them to you like poems. Your grandfather was one of them.

Still, I felt like I had to choose something between his path and my own when I was a young man. I felt like I had to choose between a political path and an artistic one. Something about who I was as a young man didn’t know how to be both. It had something to do with America. Was America the nightmare it had been for my father or was it the diner around the corner from my apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco that seemed full of short stories I hoped to write? There are a lot of things you have to do before America can be both, but the first thing you have to do is laugh. 

I don’t know if that will make any sense to you, because there was a lot of anger and sadness that went into that laugh. That is where I landed though. I landed somewhere that said it was funny to think of America as both. It was funny to move in two directions at once, to be more a part of this place and less a part of it at the same time. When I think of you growing up, and you and me talking, I hope that I can help you find your own way for America to be both. I hope that some time later when I tell you about this year, about the year when every child in Gaza was you, that you can look out the window and know that the way the sky and the street blend together is yours, that it is yours here in America. If you want to know a secret, the truth is it is more yours. It is more yours when you are lost about the America that did this to the children who look like you. I know that’s a tough one to believe. I’ll have to tell you about this year with love, since love leaves you with a shot at loving the America outside your window when it hits you in a nice way. I suppose if I have to cry, I’ll cry. I don’t know what it would have done to me if my father had cried when he’d spoken to me about America. Once or twice he came close, and his way of talking certainly didn’t preclude tears. I want you to know about the strength that comes after crying. The funny thing is, you already do. I just want you to know that it still applies to the biggest things there are to cry about. I guess what I am saying is that I want to be careful about making a soldier out of you. I saw this year more clearly than I ever had before that a writer is a soldier who has to wake up and rediscover their war every day. That’s what I was looking for as a kid. It was a feeling of strength to wake up each day thinking I knew my war, that I was on the side of boys and not on the side of tanks. It was a feeling of strength to think I was fighting a version of my father’s war. But in my heart I knew the thing had to be new. The way my father’s war had been new to him. The closest I got back then was basketball. When it was going right, every trip down the court was new. Nothing in the world had ever unfolded quite like that before, and when the people you were playing with could give themselves over to that alongside you, they were your comrades. Writing just meant you had to be that comrade for yourself.

I don’t know if you’ll have a time like me, when you’ll long for the battle lines of your war to be drawn and decided. It gives an awful lot of clarity to things to have that. I see it today in the Israeli soldiers who can see a Palestinian child as an enemy. They woke up in the morning knowing the confines of their war. One place they knew it wasn’t was inside them. It gives an awful lot of clarity to things to know that your war is outside you. I was looking for an answer to that question all the time as a boy. I cried out to the world to tell me once and for all if my war was inside me or outside me. But when I finally learned to face the silence I got in response, I knew what kind of soldier I had to be. 

It may seem funny to you that I was thinking about what kind of soldier to be when I was walking to a school in San Francisco to spend my days with children a few years older than you are now. It was funny to me too. I was a soldier with a wink, winking at the comedy of their own soldier-ness. But if there were principles that I wanted to see enacted upon the world, I could introduce them myself in a schoolyard. What is it about children that can make a schoolyard the size of the world? I don’t know, but I knew that whatever kind of soldiers they were going to grow up to be, I wanted it to be the kind that remembered who they were as kids. That was all I wanted to do each day, was to treat them like who they were today was worth remembering. I was a soldier about that. But they made it easy, because who they were today was magnificent. It was an easy kind of soldiering sometimes, and I would sometimes feel a little guilty getting on the city bus to go home, until I remembered that the point was to soldier like that out in the world as well. That was when it was best to have a wink with you. I reached some real heights of sincerity in the schoolyard, but anywhere else, it was good to have a wink. You didn’t even have to wink it, just have it around.

I needed that wink, because I built a little religion in the schoolyard, and all it said was that anything that people do to children, they did to the child they were themselves first. (It’s good to have a wink with you if you are going to be pious out in the world.) They already told the child they were that they were the worst kind of fool—the kind that believed in a nice world. They already broke that child’s heart, and it isn’t too much further to drop after having done that. I built that religion at the time of another war on the people who look like you and me, the Iraq War, and I’d walk to the school thinking of how I could help the American kids I would see today not break their own hearts some day. It was ridiculous, but the ridiculousness had the same laugh about America in it. I recognized it as home. I wish I could give you a large home in America. I suppose there are kids who grow up thinking that something as vast as the size of this country is home. I don’t know when it’ll make sense to you that the home inside you is larger. Sometimes I think you understand it today and it’s usually at those times when you show how well you know that kindness is strength. I don’t know what anger and sadness will do to that notion, but one thing I know is that they can blend. I saw it. I saw it in the schoolyard, usually in little Black and brown girls only a few years older than you are now. I saw how anger and sadness and kindness blend to form a kind of strength that was as big as any country to me. Keep your country, I said. I don’t need it. You think I’m going to be lonely without that? I’ve had a loneliness worse than that. I’ve been lonely enough to know there’s nothing lonelier than breaking the child-you-were’s heart.

There is an America that the people who speak loudest of America mean when they speak of America, but it is not made of Americans. It is not made of all Americans at least. I don’t know what they mean, because we never had it. We didn’t have it about anywhere growing up, America or Iran. America was the source of my father’s nightmare when he was young, but it was enacted on his body by Iranians. I understood loving people better than I understood loving a country. I want you to know that the love you feel when you look out the window is a window itself to what children around the world feel when they look out theirs. I suppose that sometimes gets mixed up with notions of America. It’s very sad to think that patriotism is where the poetry lies for many people. It’s a dirty trick on the part of governments, to put their own actions on the same side as what a child sees looking out the window. When you grow up in America, you hear, in some way or another, that if you care at all about that child looking out the window, if you want them to even have a window to look out of, then you have to accept the actions of a government trying to keep that child safe. Even if that means something unsafe for children looking out of other windows. That is why their attempts to put themselves on the side of poetry are so bad. A poetry that doesn’t reach for infinity always comes out like that.

I’ve thought about how my parents had language at least to tell a story of America that burned with a sense of justice. America could be anything in Farsi, and the story we told in our house was ours. I’ll be telling you in English, which is funny, because I want English to be yours the way I had to make it mine in order to write American short stories. I had to start with language, and learn to love America from there. I had to learn to love the America outside my window. I don’t know how to be a writer without that. I promise to remember to tell you the story in a way that lets you make something out of life here. There were some days back there when I didn’t know if I could do it. You know what helped, though? It was the story of America my mother and father had given me. It brought me back, once I learned to hold it in a different way. It wasn’t a rock I was throwing at a tank anymore. It was something goofier. It was a story I took with me everywhere I went while believing that the next American I met could be better than that. Same as what the next American I meet today might tell themselves about a child in Gaza who looks like you. I’ll believe they’re better than what they might tell themselves. I’ll believe they’re better than how they might have learned to look away. I have to, kid. It’s the only way I know how to be your father. The only way I know to do it is to take my wonder at the love you are and not to guard it, not to hoard it, not to lock it away. I have to spread it around. I had to spread it around this year as you went from two to three, and the place I had to spread it around was America. It was a funny place to do it. But in some ways, any place is a funny and ridiculous place to do that. Any place is a foolish place for a father to take his wonder at the love his child is and believe that it is at the foundation of the daily comings and goings of the world. What kind of a nut would think that? There are men who would say, what if a man is pointing a gun at that wonder? What if they are pointing a gun and you have a gun in your hand yourself? What then? Where is your spreading-it-around then?

I saw this year, in those moments when I’d go quiet while we were playing or reading or walking somewhere together, that at the end of that question is genocide. It starts on the inside, and with men who take their wonder and lock it away, far enough down that it can’t breathe anymore, it can’t grow and live and discover new things anymore. It can’t learn new things because the thing that makes the killing of those children in Gaza acceptable is final. It can’t wake up in the morning curious.

This year I had a chance to see you each day and watch a genius of waking up in the morning curious. When I tell you the story of this year, I’ll try to make it fit your curiosity. I’ll try to tell you so that as big as the story is, your curiosity stays bigger. So that what people can be stays bigger. Even if it’s just barely. It’s only ever been just barely for me anyway. But I think it can be more than that if we do it together.

Love,

Baba

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Siamak Vossoughi is a writer living in Seattle. He has published two short story collections, Better Than War, and A Sense of the Whole, and his work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Idaho Review, Columbia Journal, New Letters, and Copper Nickel.