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=> Emil Keliane, 25

Emil Keliane, 25
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Emil Keliane, 25
Shiraz, Iran/Chicago, Ill.

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I was born August 12, 1973, in Shiraz, Iran. I have lived in Tabriz, Iran; Tehran, Iran; Chicago, Ill; Rogersville, Tenn.; Fremont, Calif.; San Jose, Calif.; and Santa Rosa, Calif., and now live in Marin County, Calif., where I hope to remain for a long time. English is my third language but has become my challenge, passion, friend, and artistic voice. I began keeping a diary at the age of 16, and over the past ten years the diary has become my writing gymnasium where I attempt poetic exercises and artistic leaps. I graduated from St. Gregory High School in Chicago as student of the year, and have been going to college on and off since then. These entries were written between 1995–1998. This is my first published work.

Diary Excerpts, 1995-1998

When earthbound and gagged, when obligated to trivial daily tasks, I begin to dream, and fiercely. I step out of my station, role, and mood to seek the sky because it is arbitrary, universal, and temperamental, like a poet; emotional and expansive, like a poet. The clouds like words he would use to express his many moods: now light, now dark, now still, now nomadic—traveling madly.

Maybe this is why Mother and I spend so much time in the yard these days: Once we were forced to flee our country, our home, and this escape became a pattern, and this pattern became a restlessness that drove us out into the yard, under the stars, because the sky was the only familiar thing between here and Iran.

Mother and I are in the yard again. She’s chewing sunflower seeds and doing a crossword puzzle. She is sentimental about this particular puzzle book because it comes from Iran; the clues are printed in Farsi. She even paused once, placed the open page to her face and breathed in the yellowed paper, speaking wistfully. I’m relieved to see her display such soft, childlike sentimentality. I was beginning to feel totally unrelated to her, as she has a tendency to be withdrawn, despondent.

* * *

In Tabriz when I was about 5 years old, I remember Mother and Father examining a peculiar paper that was hard and unbending, with black and white shapes that were indecipherable but fascinating. I asked them what this strange new thing was in our home and wondered silently how my own parents could be so totally enthralled by it. Dad said it was a picture of Mom—the simplest way he saw fit to describe an X-ray to a 5-year-old.

A picture of Mom! I saw no resemblance no matter how hard I looked. Squinting helped none. It was evident that the world of adults was to remain a mystery to us children. They even saw things differently.

Little did I know then that our disparate views, my parents’ and my own, would rarely find unity; that even in adulthood they would always see me from a distorted perspective, a mangled portrait not too dissimilar from an X-ray; that one day I would go to them in need and offer them the gift of five beautiful and provocative words: I think I am gay. A gift they would never unwrap, and a thing they would keep locked in a box and hidden away for always…

* * *

Some days I awake to regrets like that of a wild animal that has allowed itself to be brutally domesticated. These are moments when I am not in accord with the American culture, when I feel the puerility of having to keep up with trends, when I misplace my essential self, when I am ordering food from a much-too-sumptuous menu, when I am lost in the labyrinthine aisles of a supermarket, when I say a thing I don’t mean, when I miss wholeheartedly and can smell the fecund soil of the village where my father was born.

* * *

I grew up always in battle. Aside from the Iran–Iraq war, there existed my parents’ loveless marriage: a union of differing goals, needs, and wishes. Nineteen years of this. Although most marriages in Iran were generally undemonstrative, especially during the war when the entire populace seemed to slip into a mandatory state of grief and sobriety, I still sensed the absence of kisses, of tenderness, of playfulness. Somehow, naturally, I knew these were missing. Besides, romance was laughed at and considered a silly frivolity for the Westerner.

Over the course of my parents’ marriage the rift grew larger and larger, wider and deeper. And I learned belligerence. I used the same tactics I witnessed my parents use against each other when I was old enough to recognize my own anger for them—when I was old enough to resent them for the wars, the battles. I grew angrier, Mom grew more and more despondent until she was flat-out depressed, and Dad graduated from social drinker to solitary alcoholic.

So I know about anger, about quarrels. I know them well. I know them intimately, and I don’t want this knowledge to navigate my life. I don’t want the anger to influence me in writing. I am first and foremost tender, then I am violent. And as a creative person, I fear anger most because it is unresolved anger that turns poet into politician.

* * *

It’s ironic that in an attempt to become personally integrated in a world averse to homosexuality there would have to take place within me a heterosexual marriage of my male and female counterparts.

All my life I have tried to fathom my own gender fate. In relation to other men, am I man or am I woman? As a developing homosexual child in Iran, I learned to adopt women’s sentiments concerning men and relationships—not a liberated, enlightened, independent woman’s sentiments, but a subjugated woman’s. I learned to feel and be inferior to man.

Like the subjugated woman, the universal homosexual must fight for his own liberation, because man will not hand it to him freely.

Still, I cannot repudiate the man in myself simply because he may possess tyrannical tendencies. Equally functioning within me are the two genders. I make decisions not as strictly woman, or solely man, but as an androgynous spirit. In taste, in temperament, in identifying with and relating to others, and in general perception of the world, I am two sexes. This is true not because I am gay but because I am human and arrive from woman’s womb as well as man’s. I come from the intuitive and psychic womb of my father’s and my mother’s physiological imagination. And I refuse to betray either force existing within me.

I solely repudiate the homophobe in me, the misogynist in me, the racist in me, the bigot in me.

And I will remain preoccupied with this bridging of a Siamese bond the world broke because it was viewed as unhealthy and freakish until I have arrived at a total state of integration on a personal and spiritual level.

Man placed a veil on woman’s face to cloak his own knowledge and the truth that he would indubitably be extinct without her.

* * *

After 14 years of living in America I realize I am neither entirely Assyrian nor entirely American. I am like the migrant bird that vacillates from one sentiment to the other despite a season’s demand, collecting along the route songs of all nations. (After all, it is not the color of one’s skin that draws me to a person but the hues, the shades, the intensity of one’s compassion!)

Tonight I feel, again, that shifting of cultural identities within me. The Assyrian and the American meet, and the space between them shifts as the forming continents did millions of years ago. Earthquakes! Spiritual tremors.

I will not choose one culture over the other. I will not limit myself to one devotion that might imprison me to many prejudices. I want to be—like the sky and the poet—universal, all-encompassing, and sympathetic to all possibilities. I choose the culture of universal and emotional acclimation. America issues me a card, a semi-identity that reads “Resident Alien,” but I know I am a citizen…of hope, of borderless dreams, and of expansive living, loving.



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