I remember the first time I learned an English word. It was in a classroom somewhere in downtown Tehran. The language school was a four-story building, grand but sad, set against the smog and noise of car horns, bustling streets, and bright pastry shops that stayed open late into the night. I must have been seven or eight years old. The classroom was filled with girls of different ages, all learning the names of everyday objects. I don’t recall much—the way words sounded or what we learned about doors, windows and walls—but I remember how thrilling it felt.
I was driven by a quiet urgency. I knew that sooner or later, we would leave to join my mother’s family in America.
Sitting in that classroom, with the muffled hum of traffic outside, I sensed that my history with Iran was going to be cut short, interrupted. Our history—the way we lived, the stories we told, the memories we held, all the unrelenting hurt we bore—was not going to last. It was going to end, and I thought I would be free of it all.
At the time, I did not realize that Iran would cross oceans, following me thousands of miles away. That it would haunt me, my dreams, my memories, my stories—my present and future. That it would reinvent itself, breathe fresh air and speak again, undaunted, like a message from the underworld.
A few years after that first encounter with English in downtown Tehran, my family finally arrived in the green suburbs of Northern California. I remember the eerie, mysterious silence of the streets, the flickering lights from windows and TVs, the weightlessness of the air. In America, I had to learn English all over again; nothing I’d learned in that crowded classroom in Tehran seemed to serve me. The pronunciations were wrong, my comprehension almost non-existent. My journey started anew at school—first in ESL classes, and later, as my English improved and my love for writing blossomed, in Russian Literature courses and seminars on Magical Realism.
I read Nabokov, English translations of García Marquez’s stories, Salman Rushdie, Dostoevsky, and Chinua Achebe. I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved and understood nothing at first—not for the first few pages—until her language wove around me like a web. After that, I was under her spell. I read Achebe again because he wrote in a language not his own. I read Cortázar, Fitzgerald, and Emily Brontë. I made countless grammatical mistakes writing essays: critiquing Hemingway, praising Saramago, venting my frustration at Anna Karenina. I read The God of Small Things, Midnight’s Children, and The House on Mango Street.
I wanted to learn to write in this language that wasn’t mine. It wasn’t about mastering grammar, though the mistakes still creep up on me like shadows, breathing down my neck. It wasn’t confidence I was after—not yet. I wanted to understand how these writers found their way into their stories. I was searching for a way out.
It is, of course, not a question of generosity or expertise. Nor is it that I—or any of us, with countless cultural and linguistic ties—haven’t tried hard enough to master this relationship, to satisfy its every whim, its every unpredictable dysfunction. Languages are temperamental, impatient, suspicious of everything. You must flatter them, appease them, constantly reassure them that you know what you’re doing, that they can trust you, that you’re doing the best for both of you.
Being a writer does not make this easy. Writing carries an expectation of ownership—a sense of mastery. You’re supposed to anticipate what comes next, be ready for it. Ease. That is what you are supposed to feel. It is what you are supposed to transmit.
But what if your stories resist the language you wish to write them in? What if your characters refuse to speak it, refuse to have their lives translated into a language foreign to them? What happens when stories are forced into a language that is not their own?
I write about Iran—a country I left as a child and haven’t returned to in over thirteen years. The Iran I write about is intimate and intensely personal. Nothing in the world I inhabit today—geographically, culturally, emotionally, or linguistically—bears any resemblance to it. English is not the native language of my stories, nor of my characters, who might feel a mixture of horror and amusement if they came alive and heard themselves speaking a foreign language. Perhaps they’d shake their heads in pity, or maybe even understand. They might understand that for a writer who left at twelve, choosing English to tell their stories was the best I could do.
I write about Iran in the 1980s, when our lives were turned upside down, when everything fell apart. I write about a country that perhaps has never loved me, never cared for me, never wanted the best for me.And yet, there’s an undeniable sense of betrayal, isn’t there? Forcing these words into their mouths, making them live, love, and suffer in a world foreign to their own. Taking stories from their natural context, adapting them to your language—the language of migration—because history insists on uprooting people, scattering them to distant corners, expecting them to build anew. You learn the new language because you must. You write in it because you’ve long lost the agility to write in your mother tongue. So, you use this new language to carry your stories—your past, the smells of your childhood, the streets you once walked, your grief, your hurt, and every fragile shard of hope.
I write about Iran in the 1980s, when our lives were turned upside down, when everything fell apart. I write about a country that perhaps has never loved me, never cared for me, never wanted the best for me. I write about a place where my story began, buried in its darkest, best-kept secrets. About persecution, isolation, captivity. Things we were told, growing up, never to speak of. “Not to your teacher,” my mother warned on my first day of school, adjusting the mandatory hijab on my head. “Not to your best friend. No one must know where we’ve been, what has happened to us.”
And for years, I had done that. I had kept the secret—meticulously, faithfully. It had given me a sense of purpose, perhaps, even as a child. A sense of duty. To stand guard over this tightly intertwined microcosm of secrets and fear and promises, protecting it from the dangerous world outside. It gave me a sense of mission.
Until it didn’t anymore. Until the stories grew even stronger than the promise. The stories, the new language, the new country—so far removed from the place where these stories still posed a threat. I was far. I was safe. I could speak. I could write. I could break the silence. I could tell the entire world what had happened to us, about prisons and mass graves and brutality. And the world would listen.
But when it comes to revealing secrets, what greater betrayal than to tell it in a language that isn’t your own? What a loss, what violence. To tell a story not for those who lived it, not for the country that shared that tragedy, not for the ones who turned their backs when everything around you was falling apart, nor for those who held your hand, created a world for you, made you feel safe, joyful, like you belonged. It isn’t for them that you write—not for the people who are part of the story.
You write in a language that is a thousand miles away from them, inaccessible to them. You write about them, but not for them. You write in a space they cannot reach, in words they cannot recognize. And in doing so, you commit your second act of betrayal. Because it’s not just the characters in your stories who are forced to speak a foreign language; it’s also the very people who form the foundation of these stories—those who will never read the words they’ve inspired, never hold these pages in their hands.
“Who do you write for?” we are often asked. For first-generation immigrant writers, this is perhaps the most daunting question. In our heart of hearts, we want to write for the people who cannot read us, those we have left behind. But we don’t because we can’t. Once we cross that threshold of language, it’s over—our audience shifts, revealing itself.
In our adopted language, we turn to a new audience—not those who have lived our stories and know the voices, rhythms, and nuances of our world, but rather those who know little about it. Our audience, despite their knowledge, empathy, or curiosity, remains largely unaware of our past, history, culture, country, or language. They may have read the news, heard bits and pieces, or had a friend confide in them about a distant past. Perhaps they’ve read other books from our parts of the world, watched films, or attended seminars. They might be familiar with our revolutions, our dictatorships, and our long journeys of oppression and hope. Is that enough? we wonder. Is that enough for them to receive our stories, our secrets?
As we begin to tell our stories, committing them to paper, we realize that in our adopted language, we cannot simply be storytellers—we must also be translators, interpreters.When I was writing my debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree, I decided that to stay true to the stories, I needed to imagine I was writing not in English, but in Farsi. I told myself that even though I was using English words to express my thoughts, I had to think in Farsi, to remember in Farsi, to imagine in Farsi. I had to see English only as a vessel—that even if the words were in English, the emotions behind them were rooted in Farsi. Only then, I believed, could I remain true to myself and to the stories I wanted to tell.
But what happens to us—the writers—when we entrust our most intimate stories to an acquired language? How are we meant to master, almost cold-heartedly, the complex work of emotional translation? Because this isn’t a simple matter of choosing one language over another or swapping words for equivalents. This is about how we see the world, how we survive it. It’s about how we guard secrets, cling to our past, or pretend to let go. This is about how we live—and how each fragment of that life becomes the backbone of a story. Our task becomes to translate these fragments, to make them clear for readers who know nothing of their origin.
Pain is indeed universal, as are joy, love, and grief. But the way we speak of these feelings may not be. While we may write of joy and pain in English, our relationship to them may be shaped by our own culture, our unique way of living, expressing, and articulating them. Our connection to tears and laughter might differ; our attachment to dance and mourning, to remembering and forgetting, to past and future, to the very act of storytelling.
So, as we begin to tell our stories, committing them to paper, we realize that in our adopted language, we cannot simply be storytellers—we must also be translators, interpreters. We must translate emotions into another language, interpret dreams, disappointments, hopes, memories, a history with all of its twisted unyielding cruelty. We cannot simply write our stories; we are tasked with representing them, explaining them, adding context to make them accessible. We find ourselves stepping into the roles of patient, tireless presenters, offering background so our readers can understand—not just the events, but the weight behind each word, the subtext behind each silence. We must bridge worlds that may seem alien to our audience, all the while hoping the essence remains intact, that something true survives the crossing.
But this is not an easy task—not because we cannot do it, nor because we have yet to master the art of interpretation. It is difficult because, in that delicate, oscillating world between storytelling and representation, we carry the weight of an entire nation on our shoulders—the nation we have left behind. The culture. The language. A history that rarely begins where others think it does and seldom concludes as others imagine.
Have we done justice to the stories? we wonder. Have we been successful in carrying them over the bridge unscathed and true? And what about our audience? Will they truly understand our stories? The weight of our experiences, the intricacies of our trauma, the undying presence of our past—will these resonate? Will they make a connection, or will they be lost, diluted by a distant language, by unfamiliar contexts?
As we bring our stories into the world, we grapple with ceaseless anxiety and doubts. We question ourselves, our expertise, our motives, our own sense of self in the stories we tell. We feel that no one can help us. No one can guide us. No one can tell us what to save and what to leave behind. And we fear it, this loneliness, like everyone else fears death. We fear our stories won’t matter, not in the ways that we want them to. We want our stories to represent us, and we are weary of having them represent us. We want to be our stories and also more than our stories. We wonder where we begin and where our stories end, fearing that we—the individual, the writer, the storyteller—will be lost amid the weight we carry, the language we have acquired, the past and present we are seeking to bridge.
But we have come a long way to turn back now. Once we write our stories, it is no longer up to us to decide. The stories cease to be ours. They are out there, alone, braving a world distant and unfamiliar, trying to do the impossible: to be relatable. Each story carries the burden of our histories, our traumas, and our dreams and secrets, yet it also holds the responsibility of connection, of bridging the gap between our worlds and those of our readers. We take what was fragmented, misunderstood, or lost and make it whole again, shaping it into something others might grasp. That is why we are here. That is what we have become.
So, despite the exhaustion and vulnerability, we press on. We keep writing, keep persisting, keep waking up every day to find the right way to the tell our stories, to make our world a little more visible. We write because we know that no matter who we are or how we arrived here, our stories are bigger than us. Each word we write is a declaration of existence, an act of perseverance, a means to reclaim our narrative in a world that often seeks to erase it.
Language is not just a vessel; it is a living entity. It changes as we change, lives as we live. It is no outsider but a part of us, breathing the same air, taking the shape of our lives, following the same paths of undoing and redemption. We take the language we have, with all its flaws and follies, all its loneliness and ambiguity, and make it our own. We use it in our own fierce, imperfect way to tell our stories, to claim them, as much ours as part of the greater narrative of that universal story that surrounds us all. We write because we refuse to disappear, and we refuse to let anyone else tell our story.