‘My family was wrenched from all that was loved and familiar, yet there were no rituals to mourn our loss, no baptism for the painful rebirth. Instead, we were driven to bury the evidence of our personal catacylsm. Our differentness was a taint that we carried. The comsuming need to belong led us to purge ourselves of that which once made us who we were – our accents, our awkward clothes, our beliefs. We were faced with an unspoken choice; to be alienated from the world around or from our innermost selves’
“The Break’ from ‘Saffron sky’ by Gelareh Asayesh .(Featured in “Let Me Tell You Where I ‘ve Been – New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora’ (Ed. Persis M Karim), which I have been dipping into recently).
Although I was born in the UK, my mother (who died in 2004) transmitted her Iranian culture to us in such an ongoingly intense and passionate way that I have felt the absence of this to be like an aftershock of her actual death. She used to read/listen to Iranian news for up to four hours a day and call us with updates.(I loved it). She was the access to so much (admittedly biased) information which had a great influence on my work and life and still does. I don’t quite know how if I should try to reclaim this, or how to begin. Sometimes it feels as though part of me has moved country and is looking for a trap door back to that space where I heard and tasted and laughed and raged at her often extreme but always vibrant view of the world. To tie the connecting thread to her Iranian/ Azeri culture from me to my children. My arts practice is the trap door and this project will open it again.
There isn’t a ritual for the initial experience of cultural displacement, but there could be. There may exist rituals that I do not know about. Often people who are forced to leave their homes leave only with the clothes on their back, mere threads carrying memories of a place that may be lost forever to their daily experience. I think that somehow this next piece of work, this child of the loom project, will offer an experience of marking the shedding of one cultural skin and embracing of another. We have rituals for the loss of the body, so why not one for the loss of a homeland and the transition into a new cultural landscape?. Am going to look into what exists.
