Iranian immigrant identities are much more than your Orientalist fantasies

Responding to They Want by Marjorie Lotfi Gill

My optician rang a few weeks ago; a contact lens check was overdue and with the pandemic still raging, I obviously couldn’t go in. Running through my details to confirm they were correct, he suddenly paused. “That’s a very interesting name,” he said earnestly, “where is it from?” 

“It’s Iranian,” I replied, pre-emptively chirpy, dreading where this was going. 

“I had a friend who was Iranian,” he told me. “She was a woman – they’re not very good to their women there, are they? You must be glad to be here”.

It is a line I have heard innumerable times before, and yet each time I struggle to respond. An awkward mumble, a flare of prickling shame for not arguing back, and the moment has passed, my prescription is filled, and I can go back to my life, to – supposedly – being glad to be here. Yet for weeks afterwards, the interaction replays in my head. 

It is still replaying as I sit down to watch Iranian-American poet Marjorie Lotfi Gill perform her new spoken-word piece They Want, about her own experience of navigating Western expectations around Iran. The poem barely lasts five minutes, but with each passing second I am overwhelmed with recognition, struck anew by the extent to which Iranian immigrant identity is held hostage to the Western imagination.

“They want me to write a poem,” begins Lotfi Gill, a refrain that echoes throughout her piece; the anonymous “they” always present, always looming, always watchful. She gazes intimately into the camera, a gorgeous red shawl stark against the white background, her tone gentle yet unflinching as she speaks, “They suggest I write a poem, they say, about Iran.”

The Iran they want her to describe is one inscribed with trauma and bloodshed, an Iran that slots neatly into continuing Orientalist fantasies about a barbaric Middle East. Suggestions spill from their mouths: the Islamic Revolution, blackouts, riots, martyrs facing down tanks, fleeing the country with a few precious treasures clutched close. Again, and again, Lotfi Gill is asked to relive the violent conditions of her exile, to sketch out a picture that is safe and familiar to a Western gaze.

Yet, this is not the full story, and Lotfi Gill demands that we recognise its curation, the ways in which the threads of her childhood have been unpicked and rewoven to create only a partial tapestry. “They give me a single sheet of paper,” she says steadily, “that’ll do, they say. And don’t forget to write within the lines”. There is a pencil too, “the kind that smudges, its lead too soft, made for the crosshatch of shading”; a pencil that resists the rigid frameworks and “sharp-edged words” that they demand of her. 

Watching Lotfi Gill draw attention to the confines of her expression, to the ways in which her relationship with her own history and identity are policed, I feel a strange unclenching in my lungs, a pull of deep familiarity. It is an unspeakable relief to hear someone else not only articulate the flattening of our culture but defy its doing, to take the pencil and shade outside the lines.

Instead, Lotfi Gill begins to suggest her own poetic subjects: the experience of being mixed-race and unwelcome in America, of being asked if her blonde mother adopted her, of hostile playgrounds and waiting anxiously for her father to join them from Iran. “No thank you,” her critics insist, uninterested in experiences of fear, alienation or cruelty that are caused by their own violent structures.

However, her critics cannot unsay her words once they have been spoken, and they linger rebelliously both within the poem and in my own mind, giving voice to what I have wanted to shout back for so long: “But you aren’t very good to your women here, either. But you are violent and oppressive here, too.” Why, the poem asks us, should these abuses of power go unremarked?

In seizing control of her story, Marjorie Lotfi Gill begins to unveil the full tapestry, imagining her struggles and identity complexly outside of partial narratives, and resisting the urgency for gratitude that marks most immigrant and refugee accounts. Performing the final lines of They Want  –  “they want me to write a poem, they say, that says thank you, thank you very much” –  I am reminded of another brilliant Iranian immigrant author, Dina Nayeri, and her recent book The Ungrateful Refugee. “Gratitude is a fact of a refugee’s inner life; it doesn’t need to be compelled,” Nayeri claims, “But it is mine. I no longer need to offer it as appeasement to citizens who had nothing to do with my rescue”. 

In They Want, Lotfi Gill strips back the appeasement of trauma and gratitude until only her truth remains. It is a truth that refuses to capitulate to either country’s violence, a truth that is both personal and plural, a truth that no sheet of paper or brief phone call can contain.

They Want was part of the Sorry I Was On Mute series, curated by Hannah Lavery for Fringe of Colour Films 2020.