And so, death showed up every morning as a first thought, with our school principal shepherding us seven-year-olds down the streets, making us chant “Death to America,” setting fire to the stars we were yet to count, wishing death on a nation none of us could begin to know.
We were the children of the dead, priding ourselves on all the “heroic” ways in which our dads had died as “martyrs,” mastering words that denied us an idyllic childhood: shrapnel, missile, and RPG, which sounded like the coolest word to leave our mouths.
War-loving men fail to understand: your father being summed up in a stack of letters and a stoic portrait; seeing your friend’s blind dad walking his son to the school bus every morning, waving to him (the son would wave back); eyes rolling at the curious question: Where is your dad?
“Dead,” I’d respond, refusing to dignify death—the finitude of flowers and persimmon trees in my grandmother’s house yard. “Dead,” I’d say, though he died in a war with his Iraqi enemies who could have been his brothers in another life.
But I do not want John, my best friend from my time at Saint Mary’s College, who happens to be serving in the US army, to simply scan my hometown with unseeing eyes from thousands of feet above; a “reconnaissance mission” over the city where I have grown up, dreamed and fallen in love.
Photo Credit: Morteza Delgir
Siavash Saadlou is a writer, translator, and teacher. His fiction has appeared in Margins, his nonfiction in Public Radio International, and his poetry in Scoundreltime and Saint Katherine Review. His translations of contemporary Persian poetry have been published in numerous American literary journals, including Washington Square Review, Pilgrimage, Visions International, and Writing Disorder, among others. Saadlou holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California, where he was also an English Composition teaching fellow. He lives in Tehran, Iran.Read more from Siavash in SKR Issue 7.1
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