#gabriella kamran

[zamancollective]

Mahane Yehuda / מחנה יהודה

By Gabriella Kamran

Photo collage by Sophie Levy

Italics from The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds by Yehuda Amichai

You don’t like smoking in other cities. You take pleasure in buying Friday morning figs from the same spot your tongue first met the lips of someone you would later love, your bodies pressed against graffiti on the shuttered market door in the night. You forgot the names of boys too religious to kiss you in the alleys that smell like fish on ice. The main roads are arteries of an old Eastern heart and the Shabbat crowd sweeps you in like a transfusion. Counting almonds in a bag, you bump into the woman who taught you, seven-thousand miles ago, the word shaked. In che tarzeh harf zadaneh? How could you speak this way?

two tastes / that didn't know each other and became one in our mouth. / And over  the cafe door, next to the sky, it said: / "Not Responsible for Items Forgotten or Lost."

Olive pits in your fist, these memories, plucked from someone else’s tree. An uncle's house with samovar whistling in the kitchen. The clock hands of youth turning so you felt new on each arrival. Shuttered walls that fell open as they raised you. New families moved into your uncle’s house. Their children will kiss in alleys. Tell me again this is not my exile, tell me again I was raised only where I was born.

But where exactly? As in a children's game: / cold, colder, getting warm, warmer, hot, right there. / What shall we do with that old story now, in our own day? / One generation handed it down to the next in the synagogue reading

You can swallow words like “generational trauma” and grow olive trees in your stomach. Dream deferred, memories displaced, fig dried in the sun. Diaspora grew legs, crossed borders with forged papers. The city handed you a suitcase from Tehran with your last name on it and unpacking will take many lifetimes. Anyone can make memories seem like a wet portrait. Drag your finger through my poem, I dare you.

lovers leave fingerprints on each other / plenty of physical evidence, words without end, testimonies, a wrinkled / pair of pants, a newspaper with the exact date, and two watches

The olives are making marks in your palm, chewed dry. You tried to bury them and they called it planting. Where will you put them down? Where can you? Where?

hands severed, hair ripped out, a gash where the mouth used to be / and demanded

what was theirs, theirs, theirs

Published February 28, 2020.

[zamancollective]

The Constructive Agony of Talking Politics at Shabbat (Or How to Survive a Debate with Your Relatives) 

By Gabriella Kamran  

Illustration by Sophie Levy

I wasn’t yet 20 years old and I had already forgotten what it felt like to join my relatives for Shabbat dinner and eat brisket without a side of political commentary. Was that a new phenomenon? Was I too busy spitting tomatoes into napkins as a child that I didn’t notice the moral axioms being thrown above my head? Regardless, charged conversation after charged conversation gradually emerged from background noise while I chewed to a dynamic that captured my interest and charted the course of my intellectual development. 

It seems accurate to say that I entered the fray around the same time I started buying my own clothes. These were the early teenage years: I was testing the waters of feminism, experimenting with political Facebook posts, and learning that not everything I believe to be true is, in fact, the truth. Every young person has a moment of realization that adults can sometimes be profoundly wrong. Mine took place gradually over a series of weekly dinners, as my male relatives argued and I felt an arsenal of my own opinions weighing in my chest. 

I will say with no qualifiers that it is difficult for a fourteen-year-old girl to wedge herself into a conversation with several adult men. First, there is the issue of a quiet voice, not yet amplified by the support of social affirmation. Then there is the matter of being taken seriously — that is, the unspoken surprise that I was not in the living room talking to my girl cousins about nail polish. 

(The aunts, for their part, either ladled soup in the kitchen or listened at the table, inserting a comment when appropriate. For a long time, I interpreted their disinterest as ignorance or resignation to gender norms, but with maturity one gets better at recognizing weariness. I remember once my jaw dropped when a cousin’s grandmother expressed a political opinion out loud- something about Hillary’s foreign policy. I hated myself for being so shocked that she’d have something to say.) 

I learned quickly that family debate is rocky terrain. The post-meal discussion usually unfolded as follows: 

Man 1: This ObamaCare is going to put doctors out of business, I’m telling you. 

Man 2: Just awful. The liberals are pushing us towards socialism. Aunt: We’re just giving more and more money to the lazy bums. Me: What about the majority of poor people who aren’t lazy and were born into poverty? I don’t think anyone genuinely wants to be on welfare. 

Man 2: Oh, no. We send our kids to the conservative schools and they still get brainwashed by liberals. 

Man 1: Question everything your teachers tell you, Gabs. They have an agenda. An agenda. 

Alternatively, the “elders” card was pulled and the conversation stopped short: 

Me: I don’t think you should call people _____ 

Relative: You can’t speak to me like that. How can you disrespect your family?

The more politically conscious I became, the more these dinners began to wear on my nerves. At school, I was learning so much I could almost feel my mind growing into itself. The classic teenage practice of finding oneself was in full force for me as I wrote school newspaper op-eds in my successive editor positions and defined myself in the lines of my rhetoric. Dinner with relatives sucked this pride out of my chest and pulled the plug on my budding confidence. I oscillated between righteous indignation that prompted me to sit firmly in place when the political debate started during our meal and outright fear that anyone would ask me at any point in the night about something of more import than my week’s activities. Family dinners became a matter of fight or flight.  

I took refuge in journalism and books. They seemed to possess more certainty than my relatives’ armchair sociological analyses. I read Betty Friedan, Ta Nehisi Coates, Ari Shavit… and the fact that I considered these all to be radical texts is indicative of how intimidated I felt in political terms. My progressive ideals were no longer inclinations; I could use words like “neoliberal” and “reactionary” to match my relatives’ rhetorical skill. Vocabulary aside, however, a gulf persisted between me and some of the men in my family.

What was this gulf, exactly? Was it a generational gap? Surely an ideological divide existed between every new crop of cousins, fathers and daughters, uncles and nieces. Common wisdom dictates that naïve youth will always be more progressive and open-minded than their older counterparts. It seemed to me, though, that something more was at play here. These Shabbat dinners meant more than a blasé tidal shift in opinions, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. 

The time came for me to go to college, and I was surrounded for the first time by a collection of politically conscious people who had enough intellectual acuity to rigorously critique the elder generation’s values. 

I met friends who told me their grandparents were “hella liberal” and still smoked weed on the weekends, and I beheld these friends in awe. This must have been the diversity they extolled in admissions brochures, the expansion of horizons — but which one of us was living in a bubble? Then there were the students who seemed to have swallowed their relatives’ platitudes like pills, rolling their eyes when they passed a student protest or snickering at T.A.’s requests to state our preferred gender pronouns. These students made me the most uneasy.  

Mostly, though, college brought me a network of friends who shared my experience. By this time we had all developed standby strategies to deal with opinionated table talk: some blocked out the rhetoric and ate their khoresht in peace, and some, like me, often ventured back into the weekly scuffles like moths to a partisan flame.  

But, of course, it was more than righteous indignation that pulled me back into the tides of argument. The supposed radical leftist hegemony on college campuses gave my relatives plenty of dinner table fodder on the nights when I made the ten-minute journey from my dorm to their dining rooms. They particularly liked to raise an issue with my chosen minor, Gender Studies, which they denounced as man-hating. As they prodded me about my professors in order to attack their liberal agendas, I felt the familiar nagging anxiety: Was the leftist haven I found in college making me tone-deaf, insular under the pretense of high-minded morality? I felt obligated to listen to every dismissal of Hillary Clinton, every racial slur, and every condemnation of Islam. This was my internal protest at their accusations of narrow-mindedness. 

I still wondered what was really new in our political conversations. Topics had changed — Obama and McCain became Hillary and Trump, Al Qaeda became ISIS, gay became LGBTQIA+ — but the emotions I had as a young progressive facing several elder conservatives were constant. What were we all feeling during those semi-heated exchanges? We one-upped each other and attacked arguments at weak points, but what was the seed of all this debate? Perhaps it was a sense of familial betrayal. 

We swear to keep family and business separate but there is no such promise when it comes to politics, although we know they are equally divisive. “The personal is political” is also true in reverse — to disparage someone’s worldview is an affront to their world. Political standpoints are currents that run deeper than the surface waters of opinion. Debate is healthy and insult is not, and the line between them is fine. 

One August night before my freshman year of college, one family member reminded me once again to question everything my professors would tell me.  

“These are a different kind of people. Really liberal. They don’t think like us.” 

I wondered briefly what he meant by “us,” considering our often radically divergent opinions. He had been at the dinner table all these years — could it be that he never truly listened to me? 

My cousin leaned toward me, interrupting my thoughts. 

“Or you could come back from college a flaming liberal, and we’ll still love you.”

 I was struck by the resonance of my cousin’s joke, and I still think about it often. By the very merit of calling one another family, we make an implicit promise to stand by one another and love unconditionally – that is, regardless of ideology. When we sit across the dining room table, embroidered white tablecloth stretching between us, and launch attacks intended not to teach, not to strengthen, but to change, there is a sense of combat that doesn’t belong in a family. These mealtime political debates are not a leisurely pastime but a battle driven by an attempt to win, and to win means to vanquish. Hovering over the platters of chicken and tadig is an intention to change one another, and the promise of loyalty feels contingent upon your next comeback.  

Isn’t that what families do, though? We change each other. Any amateur psychologist will tell you that our personalities begin at home. Parents, and to an extent other relatives, are charged with the responsibility of edifying their children. It takes a village, and a large part of this is the admonitions and proverbs of the villagers. Perhaps my relatives feel this weight of social obligation propelling them forward as they critique my beliefs. They crave my confirmation that they are succeeding in their efforts. Maybe when I push back and hold my own, they feel some kind of failure. 

There’s a Jewish parable in which a sage, faced with a crowd of scholars who disagree with his judgment, asks God to determine who is correct. God declines to comment. The wise men debate and eventually move forward with a decision. From heaven, God laughs with joy: “My sons have defeated me!” 

The goal of true mentorship has never been indoctrination. Young people look to their beloved elders to create some kind of safe space to learn to walk, to stumble, to mess up. The goal is that eventually, the pupil becomes the teacher. A student who recites their teachers’ talking points is a student lost.  

Through the ages, a 7 p.m. roundtable over plates of freshly-cooked dinner has been the family’s classroom. The curriculum is set by the routine inquiries of “What did you learn at school today?” and, “How was work?” Some families study in groups of three, and some are lucky enough to learn alongside dozens. I should hope that men in my family take enough interest in my growth to stretch my mind and challenge my thinking. So, too, should they hope I prove them wrong sometimes. 

[zamancollective]

Jerusalem of Sefarad

By Gabriella Kamran

Tip a golden chalice over stone walls

And let it turn the river into kiddush wine.

Once again, there are more parables 

In the walled city than Jews.

Star and moon crossed in a ménage à trois,

And every man covered his head in modesty.

Their caps looked like difference

But were also exactly the same.

Sinagoga de Santa Caliph ha Levi.

חי, חי, חיים

You can’t really love two cities the same.

Sefarad, Safed, Saphah,

Saphon, Saphon,

Toledo - I will write your name with my left hand

For there’s a chance I’ve already forgotten you.

Published August 4th, 2019.

[zamancollective]

تهران‎ / Tehran

By Gabriella Kamran

Her name grows cold on your tongue.

Saffron ice cream from street vendors

In the summertime he asks about

That love from seventy-four. You saw her

On the news. On Facebook.

On your childhood street when 

Tear gas vaulted over your doorstep.

Again. Like the second time reading her diary

Or finding her turquoise in the family armoire.

You dig for her in the slit of every Turkish coffee

But you count in English. Traitor.

Who is he to ask about her?

This is between you and the ocean.

Who taught you to hate the shape of your lips

Your tongue and your mother’s maiden

Name? Who taught you to bury such young,

Fragile things? Who forgot your summer clothes

At the Black sea? Was it they who locked your 

Childhood window and packed away

Every pistachio candy that fit in her palm?

Memories of her catch in your throat and

They call it your accent. They quote

Rumi in their poems and love the taste

Of your rosewater. She watches them drink

With Atlantic salt in her throat.

Here is the first bitter love who never wanted

You in the first place.

[zamancollective]

Shalem / שלם

 By Gabriella Kamran

Photo by Sophie Levy

Three calendars hang in our kitchen:

One begins in spring, one in fall

One in winter. The start and halt

Of a well-used car. A sundial

Someone keeps moving. Summer begins

In my Papa Joon's memoir. On page

1940: a bucket of water to chase  

The sewage from his house in Hamadan.

1970: British petroleum, moving oceans.

2000: grandchildren piled in front of a VCR

Watching Jumanji on Shabbat for the 8th time.

2019:

I can switch languages like jumping

Across city roofs, because they share

A grammar of time. What a blessing

To have so many words for beautiful

Moments: Chai with dates and fistfuls

Of pomegranate. So many women

To read about who pulled the fences out

From walled gardens. We are born  

On three days each year. I am three women

And sometimes they talk behind each other's backs.

And sometimes words taste strange

In my mouth, like the pale dust of "grandfather"

Or the palatial splendor of es-ra-yil or

The easy gutturals of Yiddish. For whom

Is my Papa Joon writing? For me, for me

It is all a gift for me.