There is a yoga pose in which the practitioner, lying on his or her back, lets dangle the index finger of each hand around the big toe of each foot. By bringing the knees down towards the mat, the yogi or yogini works to open the hips, where many repressed emotions and phantoms lie dormant. It’s a very vulnerable position. In California, this is called Happy Baby. In New York, it’s called Dead Bug.
I felt dead inside, carrying a stillborn novel with me, when I got to JFK airport in New York on December 19, 2007. I arrived in Orange County’s John Wayne Airport trembling; it wasn’t as warm here as I’d hoped it would be. But, then again, 68 degrees feels ice-cold to an absurdly thin woman weighing a meager 95 pounds.
I spent the next two months of my introduction to California trying to get back to the writing, only to go into seizures, which left me weak and at the doorstep of a doctor, who insisted on pumping me full of anti-anxiety and anti-depressant pills. After that, I could only lie curled up in fetal position on the blow-up mattress in my half-sister’s guest bedroom in Anaheim Hills. I rarely visited my mother, who wasn’t fooled by the many layers I wore. She claimed the chill of New York had chaspeedeh, stuck, to my bones and tried nursing me back to health with force-feedings of bademjoon whenever she had the chance. In my most immobile state, which I now romanticize as being akin to a Sufi trance, I obsessed about the losses and the indignities I’d endured back East. I practiced yoga religiously and dwelled on what it would mean to live in a city where the closest airport was named after an iconic cowboy. But I hadn’t officially moved yet. I’d stored the things I couldn’t bear to throw away in a Brooklyn warehouse space and abandoned my beloved ‘70s furniture in the Victorian brownstone where I’d given no notice of leave to the landlord. He’d made it a habit for the past two years to turn the heat off in New York’s below-freezing winters. He also had a habit of blaming everything on the Jews and telling me I reminded him of his daughter.
Eighteen years I’d struggled in New York—in that city everyone is expected to applaud, but for which no one really can find a genuinely convincing expression of awe. For eighteen years, I’d stayed south as south could get to avoid the excesses of uptight uptown and the middle-brow mediocrity of midtown. I’d made an oath to myself years ago, as well as to the dwindling number of artists around me, never to live above the 14th Street line.
After September 11th, when the number of policemen trained to shoot terrorists in the head with dead-on precision began to surpass the number of pedestrians dotting the concrete landscape, I revised my oath to exclude all of Manhattan. Call me crazy: I didn’t feel safe being around armed teenagers, even if they were in uniform.Most of my scenester-cohorts had long disappeared before September 11th, but Brooklyn became a sanctuary for the few artists, like myself, who had chosen to stay and dare refuse to buy into the manufactured fear, packaged in codes of red, amber, yellow, etcetera. I thought the editor who approached me in August 2005, asking me to finish in three months the novel about pre-revolutionary Iran, which I’d begun writing in graduate school a year before, was one of those artists—and a trustworthy friend.
I didn’t question why I was being rushed to write the book in such a ridiculously tight amount of time when she knew I also had a job as an editor at a music magazine. I didn’t question why she’d tell me it’s okay to send out an unfinished manu scri pt because she insisted the work would need to be polished anyway. But once I did as she advised, she fell silent and became a stranger. For months, I received notes from the most powerful literary agents, some filled with praise, others with indignation, but all of them told me they would not be able to sell my work to any publisher. Most people can’t stand New York, but rarely do they admit that post-911 NYC, with its flat-line art and music scenes, its heightened sense of aggression, and its tiny, overpriced, roach-infested tenements, is no longer the center of the universe. I, for one, undoubtedly prefer the Easterly winds of the pacific and that bright orange sun setting beyond that ever-soothing mother of an ocean, well over the concrete jungle and its Dead Bugs.It took months of feeling safe here in California to find peace in calling my hallucinations about being gassed to death in my Brooklyn apartment a symptom of a nervous breakdown. It had gotten to the point where the moans of pigeons fucking in the airshaft between my apartment and the next had morphed into pleas of help from hooded and bound Muslim men being physically and sexually assaulted.
My episodes of heat-deprivation at the hands of a miserly poolaki landlord had become a prelude to my extermination while living in the ghetto.
Everyone thought I was crazy. Even I thought I was crazy when I stepped outside of an otherwise logical stance in the eye of my creative storm. It was impossible to convincingly explain to people that I was fielding death threats via email and telephone, that I knew my computer was being monitored because my curser would fly across the screen without me touching the keyboard and that I was constantly opening documents from my novel to find the original order of words scrambled.
It was impossible to make people believe the truth because I also believed I was being gassed to death in my apartment with the occasional phantoms visits by victims of Savak and Guantanamo!
I didn’t know then that repeated death threats, the persecution (my eventually permanent state of unemployment and near-starvation), and the overall perception of me as a terrorist despite the fact that I was a small-ish young, highly-educated, single, chador-less woman in a city filled with armed gunmen, would set off a depression so severe that it would eventually give way to hallucinations. Only now do I understand that my artistically inclined subconscious was doing nothing more than spitting back nightmarish, albeit meaningful, echoes of the ugly reality I was being forced to bear witness to beyond my own circumstance of not being free to speak, write, eat and live like a human being.And all through the loss of the much-needed 20 pounds from my already-small frame and the uncontrollably frequent Post-Traumatic Stress anxiety attacks, which sometimes left me out of breath or unconscious, I judged myself for not having finished and sold my book. I badgered myself for having verbally attacked the people who’d betrayed me by not making it happen.
I hated myself for having been gullible enough to ever think it could’ve been any different. I blamed myself for sending seething notes of anger and hatred to the New York City agents, editors and publishers who were well aware of what was happening to me. I belittled and threatened my puffed-up former writing professor with empty fists after he, too, fell silent. He’d taken me to his limping fitna of an agent, who sent me to a woman, famous for having dated the leader of the Beat writers back in the ‘50s. She simply told me to stop talking to all agents and editors, to finish the book on my own, and refused to lend me any technical support in the editing process as he’d told me she would.
I laughed at my former professor and cried because he won expensive prizes for “writing” stories based on my deteriorating state and leaving out the crux of the story, which would’ve redeemed the artistic rape. I hated him for being a shallow and less-than-human sham of an artist because I’d fallen in love with a man I’d created based on him. From my own creative impulse, I’d made him that supportive someone I badly needed, who did not really exist. Between my spasms of heartache, I blamed Bush, Bin-Ladin, the CIA, FISA, the Clintons, Wall Street. I cursed the publishing industry, the college where I got my MFA writing degree, all writing programs and all colleges. I blamed Carter, the Shah, Ach-Man-Demon-Hejab (Ahmadinejad), my mother (for having me and not preparing me for the life I’d chosen), my father (because he loosely resembled a character in my book and because he’d been completely unaware of how poor I was in New York due to my silence), my brother for not bailing me out of trouble and poverty (I’d told him how bad it really was). I blamed Azar Nafisi, and Peter Jennings. I blamed CNN and Fox News. And I blamed every single American (Persian-Americans, Zoroastrians, Jews, Muslims and Christians, Baha’i and every other religion and ethnicity included) for sitting and watching the news--the killings on television (war) without really seeing what was and is happening (senseless war). I felt no one was choosing to see—really viscerally see--that innocent people were and are being killed based on lies and greed.
Meanwhile, the widowed and orphaned and the soon-to-be widowed and orphaned, are waiting and hoping to be saved.It’s really happening. Everything I’ve written here has all happened. And it continues…
Strangely enough, I eventually moved to the same city in Orange County where the very wealthy and neo-conservative/neo-progressive-esteemed “author” who later stole my book lives and teaches about the forced conversions and persecution in pre-revolutionary Iran at the hands of Muslims. After “her” work was released, she made sure to have me read the excerpt from the stolen novel in a Beat literary journal, which the self-professed Beat Maven who did not help me very much had been founder of. The passage in the journal was simply this: “I dedicate this book to all the women in the world who have been silenced.”
A kick in the ribs. But no matter, I had no ego left intact by then. And what shattered inside me into tiny pieces created cracks through which God continues to shine.
The Plagiarizing Professor seemed to sense my arrival and restoring health, too, on her then-recent YouTube video, in which she stuttered at the lectern of a college classroom, while still persisting with the unwarranted assaults—ignorant generalizations and discriminatory remarks—about Shia Islam as a religion different from any other and one that is militant to the core.
Happy Babies know that a Dead Bug is a Dead Bug, Happy Baby is a Happy Baby and that persecution is persecution no matter which way you spin it. They also know that God, Allah, Yahweh, Baha’ullah, Elohim, Khoda, Buddah, Jesus, Moses, Seraphim, (the list goes on…), are the only entities, deities, issuing legitimate copyrights to the Indestructible Truth.
Lies are worlds apart from good fiction, which documents a truth much deeper than any non-fiction could ever capture. And just as in any good novel, which inevitably stands the test of time, the truth always reveals itself in the end.
I couldn’t love California more. I live in Laguna Beach now and assist a College Chair in his Critical Reasoning class (he doesn’t think I’m crazy). Mainly, however, I live and teach yoga to keep myself and those I love sane during these insane times. Yoga instructors are much like psychologists, lawyers, and doctors. We’re crazier than our clients, and people expect us to help them. But one could say the same about the majnun mystics, about their colorful display of divanegee, divine madness.
Having had nothing more than divine inspiration to sustain me during those two dark years I spent alone, editing and revising while hungry and under attack, I became an avid reader of mysticism in its various religious traditions and contexts. I must have read and reread the whole of Rumi’s opus because he is the most-beloved poet in the eyes of all Americans, most of whom remain either unaware or prefer to gloss over the fact that his writing is pure Islamic poetry. The only thing Rumi and Hafiz are militant about is people loving one another, just as true Muslims are militant about the same message.
“Healer, heal thyself,” I’d read during that same time, in a book about bee shamans, healers who live and cure people according to the ways of the bees while subsisting on not much more than water, bee pollen and honey. I repeated that phrase to myself through the most unendurable hours of writing, while being told to die and while being dehumanized in every way. While an outsider to all support systems and being stung repeatedly by those who lack integrity, this simple command to self-restore kept me alive.
I’ve been reborn with sunshine, bademjoon, and namaste. And I know I will live up to the Sanskrit name my yoga masters gave me during my trials. “Ajaya” means “Invincible.”
I will finish my novel without fear and anxiety, without harassment. And, in my monthly column, I will fight the good fight—one truthful word at a time.
