Ashes of a Mother Tongue
Lava emerging from Mount Vesuvius at night and running towards Resina, 11 May 1771, Pietro Fabris, Campi Phlegraei, 1776. Wellcome Collection/Public Domain
It was a cold day in his village in northwestern Iran in 1946 when the book burning began. It was a beautiful, blue sky, frigid winter’s day. A ‘bluebird day’, in the parlance of ski enthusiasts. Someone started a bonfire in the courtyard of the elementary school. The children were overjoyed. They gathered around the fire and listened to the school officials’ directive to return to their classrooms, gather all the Turkish language books, and then the ones they could find in their homes, in their rooms, and their parents’ rooms. Find all the Turkish language books and bring them back to school, to the courtyard where the fire was, under that cold bright blue winter sky. The children, including my then-10-year-old father, listened and enthusiastically obeyed.
The books were gathered. And then they were burned – joyfully, gleefully.
The bonfire grew larger and the children grew warmer. This wasn’t a regular school day; this was a party! The Soviets were gone! And soon the Turkish language books the Soviets had allowed would be gone too – burned at the hands of ethnic Turkish children in northwestern Azerbaijani-Iran. The bonfire at my father’s school wasn’t an anomaly: books were burned across all of Azerbaijani-Iran that day in a coordinated and ceremonial purge-by-fire, a linguistic inferno, a cleansing, a genoc…
After the book burning came the ban. No books, no magazines, no written Turkish language allowed anywhere in Iran – least of all in schools. He may view the Soviet invasion with a degree of trauma, but to my father, those frightening nights of hiding and sleeping in orchards during the Soviet invasion were nothing compared to the lifetime of damage inflicted upon him and his people by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the Persian nationalist policies started by his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi.
He tells me this story a few times, becoming more and more agitated with each telling as I press him for further details and more memories. ‘What do you want to know about this for? What are you going to do with this information? What does it matter to you?’ he asks, more than a bit defensively. I tell him it’s because it’s CRAZY to me that he participated in a state-sanctioned book burning party as a child, that it scares me that more and more books are being banned in America, and although he’s never read Fahrenheit 451, he’s been labelled an ‘enemy of the state’ and a ‘separatist figure’ by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has confiscated all his Iranian property and accounts and will basically execute him if he ever steps foot in his home country again. I tell him all of that. ‘That’s why I’m asking you to tell me this story, daddy; it’s a story worth telling.’
If my father ever returns to Iran, he’ll either be tortured and executed or, if he’s lucky, live out the rest of his life in the notoriously horrific Evin Prison. But he’s known that for a while now; we all have. In 2011, he publicly accused the Islamic Republic of committing ‘cultural genocide’ against its Azerbaijani population at a well-attended and publicised event in Washington, D.C1. When the talk was over, he realised that more than a few of the attendees were suspected, if not known, ‘agents’ of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. My father hasn’t been back to Iran in years because of his refusal to be silent about Turkish language rights in his home country.
Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Shahpar went to register her daughter’s birth and official name in Iran. Fidan, the baby girl was to be called, an Azeri Turkish name meaning sapling, signifying rebirth, renewal, growth, and hope. After giving the submitted papers a once-over, a young clerk behind the desk returned them to her with a firm refusal, saying, ‘No. You cannot use that name. It is not in the book. You must use a name from the book.’ For better or worse, in Iran, you can’t name your kid what you like if it’s not approved by the government. Neither are any Turkish names permitted.
‘Imagine that,’ my father told the crowd at Johns Hopkins University in 2011. ‘Imagine being a mother whose choice to name her child is dictated by the state, by a state that refuses to not allow you to name your Turkish child a Turkish name, but also bans the teaching of your language in schools, forbids the printing of books in your language, of the broadcast of radio, television and music programmes in your language. Imagine that in America. And imagine what the impact of decades of such fantatical policies on your feelings of self-worth, pride, cultural and linguistic heritage must be. Imagine living life under a regime that is not directly, but is also not-so-indirectly calling for a cultural and linguistic genocide of your people.’
That was it – my dad’s one-way ticket to Evin. As he’s nearly 90, he most likely will never again see his home country, which he left in 1964 to make the United States his home. All because he cares so strongly about the language he grew up speaking in his home, the language he studied at school for only a few months before the frigid blue-sky book-burning day in 1946. The language2 he did not teach me.
I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that my father cares so much about his mother tongue that he could be jailed or executed for those convictions with the fact that he cared so little about passing it on to me and my younger sister. Our older half-siblings speak Turkish; their mother is Azeri-Iranian like my father. My mother is American; her heritage takes us to Bavaria and England rather than to the Caucasus Mountains or the Caspian Sea. I grew up in a multilingual household in which I only ever understood part of what was being said and shared. The rest was not even lost in translation, just garbled. It’s a little heartbreaking, when I think about it.
Maybe that’s why my connection to my father’s heritage comes mainly through food, through a gustatory language that needs no dictionary, that isn’t written in a book and can’t be burned – unless I burn the gazmakh at the bottom of the pot of rice, which I do more frequently than I like to admit. But at least it’s just dinner. At least I’m not burning books, tossing my cultural and linguistic heritage into a pyre, joyfully dancing around it and warming myself in its glow, innocently watching my mother tongue turn to ashes.
1 Though most of the university is in MD, Johns Hopkins' campus for their SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies) is located in DC.
2 The language is Turkish/Azeri-Turkish.
The books were gathered. And then they were burned – joyfully, gleefully.
The bonfire grew larger and the children grew warmer. This wasn’t a regular school day; this was a party! The Soviets were gone! And soon the Turkish language books the Soviets had allowed would be gone too – burned at the hands of ethnic Turkish children in northwestern Azerbaijani-Iran. The bonfire at my father’s school wasn’t an anomaly: books were burned across all of Azerbaijani-Iran that day in a coordinated and ceremonial purge-by-fire, a linguistic inferno, a cleansing, a genoc…
After the book burning came the ban. No books, no magazines, no written Turkish language allowed anywhere in Iran – least of all in schools. He may view the Soviet invasion with a degree of trauma, but to my father, those frightening nights of hiding and sleeping in orchards during the Soviet invasion were nothing compared to the lifetime of damage inflicted upon him and his people by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the Persian nationalist policies started by his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi.
He tells me this story a few times, becoming more and more agitated with each telling as I press him for further details and more memories. ‘What do you want to know about this for? What are you going to do with this information? What does it matter to you?’ he asks, more than a bit defensively. I tell him it’s because it’s CRAZY to me that he participated in a state-sanctioned book burning party as a child, that it scares me that more and more books are being banned in America, and although he’s never read Fahrenheit 451, he’s been labelled an ‘enemy of the state’ and a ‘separatist figure’ by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has confiscated all his Iranian property and accounts and will basically execute him if he ever steps foot in his home country again. I tell him all of that. ‘That’s why I’m asking you to tell me this story, daddy; it’s a story worth telling.’
If my father ever returns to Iran, he’ll either be tortured and executed or, if he’s lucky, live out the rest of his life in the notoriously horrific Evin Prison. But he’s known that for a while now; we all have. In 2011, he publicly accused the Islamic Republic of committing ‘cultural genocide’ against its Azerbaijani population at a well-attended and publicised event in Washington, D.C1. When the talk was over, he realised that more than a few of the attendees were suspected, if not known, ‘agents’ of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. My father hasn’t been back to Iran in years because of his refusal to be silent about Turkish language rights in his home country.
Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Shahpar went to register her daughter’s birth and official name in Iran. Fidan, the baby girl was to be called, an Azeri Turkish name meaning sapling, signifying rebirth, renewal, growth, and hope. After giving the submitted papers a once-over, a young clerk behind the desk returned them to her with a firm refusal, saying, ‘No. You cannot use that name. It is not in the book. You must use a name from the book.’ For better or worse, in Iran, you can’t name your kid what you like if it’s not approved by the government. Neither are any Turkish names permitted.
‘Imagine that,’ my father told the crowd at Johns Hopkins University in 2011. ‘Imagine being a mother whose choice to name her child is dictated by the state, by a state that refuses to not allow you to name your Turkish child a Turkish name, but also bans the teaching of your language in schools, forbids the printing of books in your language, of the broadcast of radio, television and music programmes in your language. Imagine that in America. And imagine what the impact of decades of such fantatical policies on your feelings of self-worth, pride, cultural and linguistic heritage must be. Imagine living life under a regime that is not directly, but is also not-so-indirectly calling for a cultural and linguistic genocide of your people.’
That was it – my dad’s one-way ticket to Evin. As he’s nearly 90, he most likely will never again see his home country, which he left in 1964 to make the United States his home. All because he cares so strongly about the language he grew up speaking in his home, the language he studied at school for only a few months before the frigid blue-sky book-burning day in 1946. The language2 he did not teach me.
I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that my father cares so much about his mother tongue that he could be jailed or executed for those convictions with the fact that he cared so little about passing it on to me and my younger sister. Our older half-siblings speak Turkish; their mother is Azeri-Iranian like my father. My mother is American; her heritage takes us to Bavaria and England rather than to the Caucasus Mountains or the Caspian Sea. I grew up in a multilingual household in which I only ever understood part of what was being said and shared. The rest was not even lost in translation, just garbled. It’s a little heartbreaking, when I think about it.
Maybe that’s why my connection to my father’s heritage comes mainly through food, through a gustatory language that needs no dictionary, that isn’t written in a book and can’t be burned – unless I burn the gazmakh at the bottom of the pot of rice, which I do more frequently than I like to admit. But at least it’s just dinner. At least I’m not burning books, tossing my cultural and linguistic heritage into a pyre, joyfully dancing around it and warming myself in its glow, innocently watching my mother tongue turn to ashes.
1 Though most of the university is in MD, Johns Hopkins' campus for their SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies) is located in DC.
2 The language is Turkish/Azeri-Turkish.