When Skateboards Will Be Free (29 page)

“I’ve carried this with me the whole time,” my father said.

My mother’s bus has arrived.

“Good-bye,” she says to Karen, giving her a hug and a kiss.

And then she turns to me. “Good-bye, said.”

“Good-bye, Ma,” I say.

And suddenly she throws her arms around me, clutching me around the shoulders, dragging me down into her.

“Good-bye, said,” she whispers, but she is crying now and the words can barely be formed.

Before I can say anything more, she picks up her knapsack and boards the bus. A line of people board behind her. Through the tinted window I try to find her. I think I can see her waving. I wave back. And soon the bus is filled, and the driver closes the door with a whoosh, and it pulls away toward Pittsburgh. We watch it pull away. The smell of diesel lingers.

And after that, we walk down to the subway station, Karen and I, where we get on the train, she drapes her leg over mine, and we rumble beneath the city back toward home.

Random House Reader’s Circle:
In
When Skateboards Will Be Free
, you on more than one occasion quote Castro’s maxim “The truth must not only be truth, it must also be told.” Perhaps there’s an irony in your quoting from Castro, but is this a statement that you fundamentally agree with? How important was it to you to tell the truth of your childhood?

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh:
I’ve always felt burdened by that statement—that feeling that you have to tell the truth no matter what the consequences are. There are a lot of people who probably wouldn’t get that from those words, but I think my childhood, where I was always taught to be high-minded and principled, showed me what the implication is: There’s one truth and certain people are in possession of it. And that can be dangerous. Not only does it lead to vanity, but it leads to isolation. As a child I was always coming up against that compulsion to tell the truth. I felt guilty a lot, tormented. In the book I describe a scene at a friend’s house when I was ten years old and I told a dinner table full of people, “I support the struggle of the Iranian workers and peasants against U.S. imperialism.” That wasn’t a popular position to be taking in 1979. It seemed that I was consistently caught between either betraying the party or betraying my friends. Generally my allegiance to the party won out.

But having said all of this I guess it’s pretty much true that I’ve come around to embrace Castro’s maxim. I wasn’t completely aware of the irony when I first decided to quote it in the memoir, and only later did I realize that in many ways I’ve actually become the ideal Socialist Workers Party member. That’s very funny when I think about it.

RHRC:
That’s interesting. What do you mean by that?

SS:
Well, I’ve told the truth with this memoir: some very difficult truths—some very difficult truths it took me a long time to accept—that’s the irony. I’ve become a great truth-telling comrade.

RHRC:
What was the precipitating factor in your decision to write about your childhood? How long had you felt that impulse?

SS:
Writing about my childhood was something that I had wanted to do since my early twenties when I began to seriously think about what I had gone through. But at the time if you’d asked me what the defining characteristics of my upbringing were, I would have said “being Iranian-American” or “being deprived.” I didn’t really make the connection to my parents’ commitment to the Socialist Workers Party as setting me apart in any interesting way. If this sounds now like an incredible omission, I suppose it is. But it’s an indication of my ability to compartmentalize certain aspects of my life. And of course, there was the fear of betraying an organization that had in essence helped raise me. But eventually I realized that if I continued to avoid the subject I would be forever limiting the scope of my writing.

So shortly after the 2004 presidential election I wrote a piece about the Socialist Workers Party, and about growing up without a father, and about how extremely difficult it is for me to bring myself to vote in any election. It was really the first time I had ever written so directly about these things and I was overwhelmed by the response. The author Thomas Beller posted the essay on his website mrbellersneighborhood.com, and just a few days later I received an email from Matt Weiland, who was then deputy editor of
Granta
, asking me to write something more about my family—which I did. And what he ended up publishing became the foundation for my memoir.

RHRC:
Were there other memoirs that inspired you as you began to write? We know from your book that your parents’ apartments were each filled with the books of Marx and Engels. But when did you yourself become a passionate reader?

SS:
When I was a child my mother would occasionally suggest adult books for me to read:
Go Tell It on the Mountain, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye
. I remember those very very fondly. One of my mother’s great redeeming qualities is her love for literature. It’s also one of her tragedies, because she spent so many years trying to suppress her hunger to read books that were not related to the Socialist Workers Party or published by their publishing arm, Pathfinder Press—not to mention suppressing her aspirations to be a writer. So while it’s true that the books in our home were overwhelmingly on one topic only, the books that my mother would bring back from the library were of a different nature. And there were three distinct memoirs that had an absolutely profound effect on me: Richard Wright’s
Black Boy
, Piri Thomas’s
Down These Mean Streets
, and Claude Brown’s
Manchild in the Promised Land
. I was probably no more than ten years old when my mother gave me these to read—far too young—and I was traumatized by their graphic descriptions of poverty, abuse, violence, and racism. The stories felt hopeless, but I also saw that it was possible for people to actually use their unhappy experiences to create something. I’ve often wondered if my mother’s motivation in giving me these books was a way to prove how much worse things were for other people. That would have been consistent with her overall tendency to be always outraged with the suffering of others, but not our own. And it’s occurred to me recently that part of the drive to write my memoir was to place my own book alongside those others which had been so successful in gaining my mother’s sympathy!

RHRC:
While your childhood was powerfully impacted by the constant presence of radical politics, it seems like other things that were missing were equally, if not more, important to your sense of self. I’m thinking of your father’s long absence from your life, but also the complete absence of a connection to his and your Iranian heritage. How has that absence, or any other, continued to mark your adult life?

SS:
I’ve always been shocked by how I feel almost no connection to other Iranian-Americans. This is partly due to the fact that being Iranian for me has always really just meant being alienated. My ethnicity has almost nothing to do with the particular features of the culture, the language, the country to which I had almost no exposure as a child. Most Iranian-Americans I meet, even those who have grown up exclusively in the United States, have a far greater sense of themselves as being Iranian. Many of them have been to Iran, or speak the language, or are involved in political causes. This discrepancy was made fairly apparent in the crisis in June 2009 over the disputed presidential election in Iran, where I was surprised that people expected me to have a strong emotional response. In truth, I just wanted to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t happening. I guess this makes sense considering that I’ve already experienced one Iranian revolution in my life, which was so painful for me, and ruinous for my family, that I have no energy to live through another one. But I think that one of the things that I’ve come to accept in the last few years is that I’m really an American. And on my mother’s side of the family I can trace my roots in this country back to the 1860s, far longer than many people. It’s my name that sets me apart. That’s the constant reminder—that part of me is from somewhere else. And that won’t ever go away.

RHRC:
There is much in your childhood that makes for wrenching reading, and yet many readers are struck by how your memoir balances heartache with deadpan humor. How important was striking that balance to you? Do you think that your sense of humor itself is a product of your childhood?

SS:
The balance was essential. I did not want to create a book about unrelenting sorrow. It would have been unbearable to write and unbearable to read. Early attempts at writing about my childhood failed precisely because I wasn’t able to modulate between the two. They weren’t an accurate depiction of who I am. I’m not by nature morose. But neither am I a comedian. How then do I tell a story about my unhappy childhood? The answer is absurdity! I’m not sure I would have ever known how to do this without having read writers like Kafka or Beckett, who are simultaneously tragic and funny. I’ll also add Charlie Chaplin to that list. (My mother took me to see some of his movies when I was a kid.) Once I was able to embrace the absurdity of my upbringing, rather than be ashamed of it, I could tell my story. As to where my sense of humor derives from, I’ve speculated that it was a counterbalance to my mother’s depression. I always felt responsible for the way she was, assuming that I was the cause. But at times she would find me delightful and amusing, and I must have known that I should cultivate those qualities. The idea of a little boy entertaining his unhappy mother is made up of both heartache and humor. And that’s exactly what I hope to bring to my writing.

RHRC:
You write eloquently (and humorously) about your life as a struggling actor in New York. How does the impulse that made you want to act relate to your later decision to become a writer? Do you see a connection? Do you miss acting?

SS:
I don’t miss acting one bit. And I’m not overstating that. I never want to be onstage again. In fact, I don’t really enjoy even going to theater anymore. Of course, the decision to give up acting wasn’t all that difficult considering I was having little success. Plus there was the humiliating ethnic stereotyping that I had to contend with in every casting call. But I also just finally realized that writing was a better way for me to be creative. There were things I wanted to say that I knew I would never have the opportunity to say unless I wrote them down myself. And perhaps the reason I’m so content no longer acting is that I’m still able to put theater on the page. By this I mean that I’m the one who gets to play all of the characters, build all of the sets, make all of the costumes, and determine the outcome of the story that I’ve created. When I write I often try to imagine how an audience would react if they were watching this on stage.

And whereas casting directors could never get past my name and the way I look in considering me for roles, I’m now able to play the leading man instead of the deli owner. And that’s been liberating.

RHRC:
How has your family responded to the publication of your memoir?

SS:
My mother, brother, and sister have all told me how much they loved the book, which I was very happy to hear. Their endorsement means a lot. My mother especially has been very enthusiastic, even if it hasn’t necessarily translated into her taking any responsibility for what I lived through. To her, it’s almost as if we were two children together being manipulated by outside forces. Her identity in being a victim of the world is too strong.

As for my father, he hasn’t responded at all. I doubt that he’s read the book and I doubt that he ever will. He hasn’t spoken to me since I first wrote about our relationship in
Granta
in 2005, and there’s a very good chance that we’ll never speak again. I knew that this was the risk I was taking. Any criticism of the Socialist Workers Party has always been unforgivable. My father has proven my point really, that politics trumps everything else—which means family, too. The lesson of my childhood was that banishment was a possibility and you had better tread carefully. Well, my father was hardly there during the first eighteen years of my life so I’m well used to his absence. And
he’s
used to his absence. It’s what we’re familiar with.