If I could teach them English

“And they asked me if I could teach them English,” she said. I completely lost it. I sobbed through the rest of the speech, and in retrospect, I can’t really remember much else she said. In fact, I’m not sure that’s word for word what she said. I do remember, though, running out of Kleenex, getting strange glances from the people sitting around me, and wondering whether staying in my seat in tears was less disruptive than getting up and walking out. I chose the former option, perhaps to the disappointment of the gentleman sitting in front of me.

The speaker was Roxana Saberi, and it was around 9 p.m. last Friday, April 2. Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist who had been arrested in Iran in April of 2009, spoke about human rights and the plight of the Bahá’ís in Iran at an event co-sponsored by Columbia’s Center for the Study of Human Rights. She recounted one day of her experience in Evin Prison. She had been feeling particularly depressed that day, and a prison guard took her to see two Bahá’í women detained in Evin named Mahvash and Fariba—she referred to them by their first names. Saberi described her first interaction with Mahvash and Fariba. She told the audience that she noticed they had more belongings with them than some of the other prisoners, an indication that they had been there longer than others had. I felt uncomfortable. She recalled a picture that one of them had of her family that she had framed in an old tissue box. I felt a bit misty-eyed. She said that the women were so excited to see her and wanted her to teach them English. I lost all control.

I couldn’t help but think of all the times I’d taught English for chump change, how I always grumbled about how I hated to do it. I remembered all the times I’d sat around and, in jest, dissected and analyzed and laughed about why Iranians speak English the way they do. I thought about how now there is nothing in the world I would want more than to speak Persian like my father speaks it and about how I have the freedom to study Persian. With her one sentence, that one simple anecdote, Roxana Saberi turned all of that on its head.

This semester, I decided that I had to come to terms with myself and with my world—that I had to get past my embarrassment about my thick foreigner’s accent and actually speak Persian with someone other than my grandmother and that I had to move beyond just first-grade handwriting and spelling skills. I signed up for Persian. I was scared. It was the closest to Iran I’d ever gotten, and I didn’t know if I’d like it.

I’m getting used to it. Moved by the knowledge, kindness, and open-heartedness of my professor, I’m coming around, I think.

And as I struggle to master the language of Mahvash and Fariba, it breaks my heart to learn that what they want is to learn the language I call my own. The only difference between them and me is that my grandparents got out of Iran. The only thing separating Evin and Columbia, dividing oppression and freedom, keeping me from being in their shoes, is something I didn’t control. It hurts. And in that moment last Friday, it all came flooding out from somewhere deep inside me.

As you read this, somewhere on campus, I’m still debating in my mind whether I should have printed this column. Writing it wasn’t a question. Writing is catharsis. It purges the inchoate yuckiness in your brain and spills it onto a page. Friday evening was a period of extended emotional purgation. But publishing is a different question. I’ve already written about my faith and my heritage several times before in this newspaper, and ultimately, who really cares what I think or how I feel? We all have our sob stories—and some are more literally “sob stories” than others.

But as Roxana Saberi’s—and Columbia’s own Kian Tajbakhsh’s—well-documented stories show, and as event speaker and journalist Rudi Bakhtiar eloquently explained, the only way we can help those under oppression is to give them the sustained attention they deserve. I’m not a journalist, and I’m not an activist. I’m just an average kid in your Contemporary Civilization class who’s wondering what to write about for his essay due Wednesday. So this is the best I can do. And I can only hope it’s good enough.

Saberi mentioned that Mahvash and Fariba read Hafez’s poetry in prison. So I close with a few lines of Hafez we studied in my Persian class last Wednesday: “Though the stages are dangerous and the goal not in sight, there is no road to which there is not an end. Grieve not.”

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College sophomore. He is the former Spectator editorial page editor. He is also a senior editor of the Columbia East Asian Review and the secretary of Columbia’s Bahá’í Club. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Mondays.