Ali Alizadeh - Iran: My Grandfather

I have no home. I know this very well have known it and lived with it for almost two decades but in times of fear, in times of paranoia and persecution, nothing comforts like the fantasy of a familiar refuge. A zone decorated with signs of family and memory, a place where we may elude the enemy: native land, motherland.

My only image of this place is a tattered black-and-white photo from 1946. It is not only a representation of my grandfather Salman in his Second World War military uniform, but the icon of his very reality in my mind. My sombre grandfather his eyes behind black glasses, his chin pushing into his neck in a posture of resignation is not merely something depicted in the rectangular frame of the withered picture; he is the picture itself, its grey tones of faded black and tainted white, wrinkled, opaque and unfathomable.

As for the reason behind this recounting of an image of an image, my verbal description of a visual depiction of a reality that ended years before I was born: my life has been growing more transient and meaningless by the year. I cant hide it any more. I yearn for a home, a concrete space to house the abstractions of belonging and identity. I should, of course, be thinking of myself as a citizen of my new country, the island where Ive been marooned since my mid-teens. But life in Australia has reduced me to a ghost, a fickle phantom who can neither beguile nor terrify; an illusive, diminishing mirage not unlike the effaced image of the once-proud Iranian patriarch, my maternal grandfather, Salman Fuladvand.

I am no longer an Iranian, and have not been one since my familys migration to Australia all those years ago. My Iranian ego was terminated in the course of a flight from Tehran to Melbourne with a stopover in Kuala Lumpur. Whatever survived of my Iranian essence dissolved in the mires of assimilation, resentment, puberty and education in Australia. As for my substance, my skin remains obstinately olive, my name unflinchingly Arabic/Islamic. Hence questions and inspections at airports, hence suspicion and hesitation at job interviews, hence the nocturnal fear of being attacked by gangs of drunken racists anywhere in the West.

But what of individualism and art? Could they transcend nationality? As a young, pretentious boy I used to dream about fighting the bayonets and missiles of war with the might of the pen, of becoming a revolutionary writer. But as a detested Muslim immigrant in Australia my words have often been rejected and ignored, and my hopes for changing the world have been cut down by the chores of day-to-day survival. My adolescents love of justice and humanity has succumbed to the pressures of alienation and racism, and become a litany of complaints by an ungrateful immigrant.

So I turn to the memory of an old photograph of a famous grandparent I never met, to excavate whatever can be salvaged from the crypts of the past. I am turning to history to make sense of the present. And the present needs to be made sense of, if new catastrophes are to be avoided, if further horrors are to be prevented; if I am to understand why Im homeless.