In the sticky-hot early fall, my grandmother would make us blackberry jam. Peak August would give way to early September, and we’d cross the dry yellow grass to the thicket of blackberries at the far end of the yard. My grandpa, Agha, admired his Douglas Firs lining the back fence – planted in the same year I was born, and now double my height at eight years old. We reached our arms between the thorns and dropped the berries into the large bowls we kept at our feet.
When I grew tired of picking or scared of touching a spider web I’d stand at Agha’s legs, holding the bowl while he filled it deep with purple blackberries. A farmer and a hunter, he wasn’t afraid of thorns or spiders.
The next three hours were spent at eye-level with the stove, Grandma Gigi mixing the berries into a compote of white sugar, purple mush, and red foam. As she stirred she spoke to herself, a mix of Farsi measurements and Arabic prayers to keep time. For every minute standing by the stove I had two admonitions – one from mom, one from Maman Gigi – warning me not to get burnt.
As the jam settled into itself, we gathered around Agha in the living room – the smell of sugar and blackberries filling the space between our sitting bodies and Agha’s floating stories.
We heard about the shahtoot – an elongated, tarter cousin of the blackberry – that grew in their orchard outside Tehran. We talked about that land and the vastly more land that had been taken away, and thanked God for this home in America and the future blackberry jam and for each other.
My grandparents visited on a green card that allowed them to stay with us for months at a time. I heard this word – “GreenKart,” in a Persian accent – almost constantly from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends, and their parents. The entire Persian community seemed only focused on whether or not loved ones would be granted a green card from the US. I was too young to know what a green card was, but I assumed the card was green, and thought it meant the government liked my grandparents enough to let them see me.
After a few years, my parents found a lawyer to work on Agha and Gigi’s citizenship application. They had stayed with us countless times on their green card, from the late eighties to the mid-2000s, without a single hiccup. But still, we worried. You can hire a lawyer, fill out the paperwork, meet the prerequisites, have children and grandchildren who are citizens, have a place to live and an income to live off of, and it still might not be enough.
The final hurdle was a test, conducted in English, on US history and government. Two people in their seventies who spoke fluent Kurdish and Farsi, but very little English, had to pass an oral test that barely a third of native-born Americans can pass.
My mom made flashcards and study sheets, and in the evenings we sat around the kitchen table to prepare. I quizzed them – my childishly high voice, in broken English-Farsi, asking questions I thought would be helpful: “Do you know who George Washington is?”
I watched my grandpa, the indefatigable storyteller, stumbling over flash cards in a language he could not pronounce, his hands tired from holding papers upon papers that spelled out his worth to a government.
The tester did not ask what being an American meant to them: as immigrants, as religious minorities, as people who have felt the weight of authoritarianism and now sought room to breathe in the country where their children had settled. He did not ask their thoughts about the role of a citizen in a democracy, or why they felt drawn to American values of liberty and justice. He asked facts, in English, that held no relevance to their lives and showed little about their character as individuals, or our character as a country.
Predictably, they failed the test. The time and energy spent on their application was wasted, and we fell back into the rhythms of a life apart.
Spring brought the new year and the start of the most important season for Iranians. Each family gathers around a haftseen – a table spread with seven items, each starting with the letter S. The year I was born, I was added as the seventh S: Saman. We never had enough time off school in spring to travel to Iran. So each March we connected by phone: ringing in the new year at different haftseens in different countries, our voices crackling across the miles of telephone lines. My grandparents’ prayers for a happy and fruitful new year briefly filling their empty seats at the table.
It was summer when Agha passed away. In fall Trump was elected, and in the winter he succeeded in banning travelers from Iran.
For years, our family’s time together has been dictated by documents. We travelled back and forth on visas and green cards from countries that decided if there was or wasn’t a place for us. We moved between a supposed democracy and a supposed autocracy, and yet in both places the laws were barriers to our being together.
In an autocracy, there is a system, and you have to fit within that system. The needs of the government are more important than the needs of the individual. But a democracy is supposed to be different. America was supposed to be founded on a simple idea: that every person has a God-given right to the pursuit of happiness.
We find happiness in being close to our families. And yet the rhetoric around immigration focuses on economic growth and a supposed burden that immigrants exert on the state. Our debates are limited to a narrow scope – whether to criminalize border crossings, to institute a merit-based visa system, or to limit the entry of those who might draw from public benefits – forgetting that immigrants are human beings, not economic units.
A new administration is now in power, and there is much rightful cheering over a departure from the hate-filled policies of the last four years. But there is a risk that we move from the obscenely racist policies of the Trump administration, to what are viewed as the more rational immigration policies of the past. But those rational policies are based on the premise of limiting entry – not empowering individuals to truly be happy.
This is an opportunity for a new approach to immigration. The antidote to four years of hate is not a return to an ambivalent normal. If we want to fight the hate, we need to put love and the pursuit of happiness at the center of our laws.
I don’t know how many seasons Gigi has left, but it’s almost guaranteed she won’t spend any of them with us in Seattle. It was a government that told my grandparents in 1979 where they could and couldn’t live and whether their land was truly theirs or not. And in 2017, it was a different – but starkly similar – government that told her where she can and cannot travel; who she can and cannot spend the final years of her life.
Love does not adhere to borders. Love does not exist thanks to a document, manifesting at the receipt of a visa, and disappearing at the whim of a regime. Love exists in the warm eyes of a grandmother, the full hands of a grandfather, the smell of blackberries on a stove-top and the sounds of stories in the air. Happiness is the feeling of a family, together.
