New York, NY: Vintage Books / Random House, May 2020. 240 pages. $16.00.
These days, it’s not hard to imagine substantial groups of Americans entertaining the idea of leaving the country for good. I’m not one of them. I associate my close call with ex-patriotism to November 2004, when I could not believe George W. Bush won reelection. I printed off the forms to apply for Canadian citizenship, came to understand some of the fees and requirements involved, and kept the papers in a “break glass in case of emergency” file in my cabinet. If the war in Iraq didn’t qualify as an emergency, I wasn’t sure what would, though I have a better idea now. I was grateful our country rebounded in 2008 to elect a transformative president, who made me feel more American than I’d ever felt before. Now, I’m here to stay, to fight for that America come hell or high water. With the way things are going, we might get both.
Such a comparatively easy resolution on my national purpose is no doubt indicative of my privilege. The same cannot be said for Porochista Khakpour, who immigrated to America as an infant with her parents during the Iranian Revolution of 1978. Khakpour’s family eventually settled in Los Angeles, and she chronicles much of her growing up, young adulthood, and life as a writer in Brown Album, a collection of essays that spans more than a decade of her writing for the New York Times and other publications.
In the collection, a central concern for Khakpour is coming to terms with her place in the only country that is—and never quite has been—her home. Khakpour’s parents were something like royalists in Iran, and the Iranian Revolution involved the toppling of this order and the takeover of the country by the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. So, while Iran is where Khakpour is from, it’s distinctly not the country her parents left; despite her parent’s assertions throughout her childhood that they would return one day, the new Iranian regime has proven strongly resistant. One can imagine Khakpour rooting both for and against her homeland, while also never quite adopting America as her home. As a child, she states of America:
I loved this country with the lukewarm, watery, neither-here-nor-there love that you bestow upon any country when it’s the only country you know. I accepted it and never, until much later, considered that it might not accept me.
That first sentence has the sound of something John Updike could’ve written, the easy love of an American child raised in a world that brought her Barbie Dolls, trips to the zoo, and Cabbage Patch Kids. Khakpour and I participated in American kid culture in the same rapt, all-encompassing way. What else was there? Who cared? The second sentence is where the complications started for her.
It isn’t until Khakpour makes her way to New York for college that she begins to understand the ways she is separate from much of American culture. As someone who became an US citizen in 2001—in New York, shortly after 9/11—it’s easy to imagine the mixed feelings and trepidations associated with an Iranian becoming an American during that period. I found myself rooting for Khakpour to feel American, to embrace her identity here, which happens at least briefly on a trip from her college life at Sarah Lawrence to explore Oxford, Mississippi.
It was also the first time I was a New York girl. In New York I was an L.A. girl. In L.A., an Iranian girl. But here there was no other interpretation. “You are so New York,” one of Robin’s friends said, though I couldn’t bring myself to get her to elaborate. I took it as a compliment.
Such perceptions represent the rosy side of Khakpour’s sense of place as the naturalized citizen of a country that has almost constantly threatened war on her homeland during her lifetime. I half wonder if Khakpour might have been happier in her adult life in a place like Mississippi, serving as a creative writing instructor in some southern version of Sarah Lawrence, as the cosmopolitan one in an American pocket where such qualities are admired. I get the appeal of New York, but it’s also not impossible for me to imagine Oxford working out for her.
Khakpour’s conflicts with America only became exacerbated after November 9, 2016, when our country inexplicably elected a nationalist president who has a problem with anyone whose skin color is browner than his own. Trump’s racism aside, Khakpour seems most offended by his disdain for academia and intellectual life.
[W]hen we have a president who boasts of reading no books, of not using computers, who has a deep suspicion of media, who ran a fraudulent university, what hope is there for the life of the mind? Given that this kind of life is already undervalued economically in this country, that question is less theoretical than it sounds.
I relate to Khakpour’s evocation of a hemmed-in sense of life for those on the left in contemporary America. The deleterious effects of Trump’s presidency for people of color is ming-bogglingly unsubtle, but in another sense, this country was built on the backs of African slaves, has perpetuated systematic racism for centuries, and has rarely if ever pretended to account for its great sins toward people of color. What’s particularly new with Trump is his enthusiastic validation of the life of speculation over fact, suspicion over reason, pettiness over grace. Exacerbated by the internet, a broad swath of Americans have been drawn down the paths of their most primitive thoughts at the expense of empathy, constructive ideas, generosity of heart. Even George W. Bush—hardly a practitioner of the well-turned idea—admired and championed these better versions of ourselves, and he started a war in the Middle East that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths—most of them people of color. What’s this new guy capable of?
Central to any revolution is dislocation. Those who supported the old regime must either adapt to the new one, exist in their homeland as pariahs, or find someplace else to live. To achieve a livelihood in an adopted country merely scratches the surface of belonging to that country. It’s possible that the pieces don’t fit, will never fit. For immigrants who count on a life of the mind to be supported in their communities, this only increases the odds that their new homes will never accept them. Still, Khakpour has found a voice amongst it all, and ways to disseminate it, and through which she connects with others who respect and relate to her. Maybe that’s as close to belonging as 2020 America allows.