By Ryan Bani Tahmaseb

Literary Hub

In one of the most tragic stories from Persian mythology, the legendary warrior Rostam unknowingly kills his own son, Sohrab, in battle. Sohrab had grown up estranged from his father, and when the two finally meet, it’s as enemies. Neither knows the other’s identity until it’s too late.

It’s a tragedy built on misrecognition and the failure to truly see the human being across the battlefield.

Earlier this summer, when tensions escalated once again between Iran and the United States, I began thinking about this particular myth. Both nations project strength while speaking in threats, each certain of its own moral superiority. Yet neither one truly sees the other: its history, its culture, its people.

My father, who was born in Tehran, moved to the U.S. with his parents and siblings when he was in elementary school—well before the so-called Iranian Revolution. His father, my grandfather, was an international businessman who leveraged his American friends’ connections.

They moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, of all places, where the geography and climate were similar to Tehran’s. They moved because my grandfather was inspired by the loud, popular myth that the United States is the greatest country in the world. They wanted to live inside that myth, too.

My father, who loves to travel, retired a few years after our first child was born and has been bouncing around the country—and to a lesser extent, the world—ever since. But it wasn’t until the past year or so that he began telling me, for the first time, that he wanted to visit the country where he was born.

I was thrilled for him—the Iranian-American man who’d once been the Iranian-American boy who spoke only Persian, no English, and somehow stumbled, then pushed, then carved his way forward, as immigrants do. But last month, during the “12-Day War” between Israel and Iran, when the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear sites, the possibility of returning to his homeland was obliterated, too.

Not that it was a perfectly safe option before, given the aggressive and violent rule of the Islamic Republic, but now, with this unprecedented escalation of violence by the US, it’s not really an option at all.

For me, there’s a profound sadness in the loss of that possibility for him—to revisit, or maybe retell, the story of his own origin.

I understand that pull.

As a writer, over the last decade, I’ve found myself for the first time digging into my cultural heritage—the Persian part of myself that, throughout my childhood, I actively disregarded and disliked. The part that gave me a last name no one could pronounce. The part that led my 10th-grade history teacher, on 9/11, to pull me aside and ask if I was worried about the coming American backlash toward people of Middle Eastern descent like me. In friends calling me a terrorist in the aftermath, and me laughing every time because I felt I was in on the joke. (Maybe I was.) The same friends who dubbed the truly very American sandwiches my father packed for my lunch “Persian delights.” And the part that caused me to be “randomly” selected for extra security checks before flights for years afterward.

Because it wasn’t until I started writing that I started taking my cultural heritage seriously. This wasn’t intentional. The stories I found myself wanting to write required learning more about Iranian history and culture—and my personal connection to both.

So, in a way, I’ve been searching for my own origin myth by writing books for children and teens that explore and incorporate elements of Persian culture. By extension, I’ve been writing stories for a younger version of myself who didn’t see any trace of that Persian part of me reflected anywhere >>>