“Mr. Boroujerdi, every time your elephant dreams of India, you set off for the West—but remember, this country needs people like you. You must return and serve it.” These were the words my dispassionately tranquil tenth-grade literature teacher, Mr. Naser Parchami, spoke to me forty-eight years ago, when I went to inform him that I was leaving Iran to study in America.

Nearly five decades have passed since I arrived in the “New World” as a sixteen-year-old student. I am now a middle-aged academic living in the Midwest. Over the years, I have often wondered: if I were to meet Mr. Parchami again, what could I say, given that I did not heed his advice?

Perhaps I would remain silent, allowing that silence to speak for a fate that never aligned with my intentions—a fate shaped by distance and longing. Or perhaps I would say that although I live in foreign lands, I carry the memory of my homeland into the night each day, and that I serve it in whatever ways I can.

Or maybe, in the spirit of today’s cosmopolitan intellectuals, I would speak of modern times and the global village, redefining patriotism not by the narrow confines of artificial borders but within the universality of our shared humanity. I could even quote the Catalan and Puerto Rican cellist and composer Pablo Casals, who once said, “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?”

I could also invoke a historical alibi. I could remind him that the 1979 Iranian Revolution brought to power Shiite clerics who tried to put politics into the ambit of theology. Inspired by memories of an irrecoverable past, these men attempted to inscribe politics in the register of the divine and launched a never-ending performance marathon aimed at pleasing God. They assassinated my father, a secular engineer working for the Iranian oil company, and years later branded me a “leading counterrevolutionary” opposed to their joyless regime. In doing so, they unceremoniously bestowed upon me the destiny of an “exile” and conferred on me a hyphenated identity as an Iranian-American. Little did I know that within that short hyphen lay an enormous world of uncertainty, doubt, distance, yearning, and tears—how much struggle and confusion can be contained in so small a mark.

One day in class, I found myself repeatedly using the phrase “you Americans” while speaking to my students. After class, one of them approached me and asked, “Aren’t you an American citizen?” I replied, “Yes.” He then asked, “So why do you say ‘you Americans’ instead of ‘we Americans’?” It was a thoughtful question, one for which I—the experienced professor—had no real answer. I mumbled something about the difficulty of having a dual identity and being bilingual, but neither he nor I were convinced by the explanation.

A few days later, I posed the question to myself in my diary:

That persistent question has returned and is pressing on my heart: are we, in this American society, anything that truly counts? Maybe I can live comfortably between two cultures, but is it possible to belong equally to both?

The question that continues to haunt me is this: where is my home? Crossing land and air borders was easy, but bypassing fences of memory and overcoming the entanglement of emotions proved far more difficult.

I eventually came to realize that exile transports one into a peculiar temporality: a strange present in which the “was” and the “is” coexist uneasily. One lives suspended between memory and immediacy, inhabiting two historical registers at once. This condition disrupts one’s moral ecology, as one remains simultaneously seduced by the sagacious wisdom of an older civilization and the omnipotent technology of a modern one. Exile thus confronts you with questions of acculturation and assimilation on the one hand, and anodyne existence and cultural discombobulation on the other.

With the Cold Hand (2023) by Nicky Nodjoumi

Exile makes uncertainty your new homestead by bursting the bristling porcupine of your certitudes you once carried with confidence. You struggle to differentiate your “house” from your “home,” and often wonder whether your “today” is indeed the “tomorrow” you were promised “yesterday.” As a member of the so called Church of the Wondering and the Confused, you vacillate between taking a brisk walk along the promenade of nostalgia and setting up permanent residence there, sleeping under the warm comforter of traditions and customs.

I entered the republic of hommes de lettres only to discover that I write history “with an attitude,” constantly running afoul of Herbert Butterfield’s injunction against writing history with “one eye, so to speak, upon the present.” But am I to blame? There is a saying, often attributed to a Taliban fighter addressing his U.S. captors: “You have the watches; we have the time.” The hyphenated identity of the exile makes you feel that you (dis)own both the watch (technology, efficiency) and the time (endurance, historical depth). Fantasies of the past bleed into the exigencies of the present, producing a consciousness that is irreducibly doubled.

Exile can often make you feel like a human derelict. You retreat into the solace of self-pity, thinking that your history failed to keep its date with your destiny. At other times, however, exile releases your introspective energies and grants you the clairvoyance to see beyond the conformism, self-righteousness, average everydayness, and existential doldrums of those walking next to you. With unshielded eyes, you perceive the shallowness of the preachers of exclusivism who luxuriate in difference all around you. In other words, exiles may live with contradictions or suffer from inner vacuity, but they can also see beyond the morbidity of succumbing to cynicism and hopelessness. As practitioners of what might be called an ideascape, they are able to interrogate warped and perfidious “identities,” no matter how sacred, emblematized, or politically convenient those identities appear. Estrangement sharpens judgment; marginality cultivates critique.

You see, Mr. Parchami! Exile has bestowed upon me a hyphenated identity as an Iranian-American, while at the same time instilling in me a palpable sense of estrangement from both sides of the hyphen. My being, indeed, cannot be reduced to a string of hyphens. I dream that if I were ever to meet you in some corner of the afterlife, I would lean in and softly whisper this verse from the fourteenth-century Persian poet Khwaju-ye Kermani:

He asked, “From where do you come, so troubled and astray?”
I said, “A stranger I am, from where all hearts hold sway.”

Marcel Proust was right when he said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." The ethical and intellectual promise of exile, and its enduring contribution to critical thought, lies in this paradox: belonging to familiarity while remaining a stranger.

***

Mehrzad Boroujerdi is the Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Education at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

***