Neeka

“She stares at me with incandescent eyes. Then her roar fills the house: ‘Those ripped away from their beloved know my wail. Having been cut from the source, they long to return.’ (Rumi’s Divan e Shams)”
― Ari Honarvar, A Girl Called Rumi

“Part of Darya had always felt ashamed of her homesickness for Iran. How could she be homesick for a place filled with cruel laws and bottomless sadness? Because it was filled with so much more than that. Because her father was still there. Because her sister was too. Because the lemon trees and pomegranates were still there. Because the poetry was still there. Because her ancestors had cultivated a life and a legacy there. Because that place was home. Her home.”
― Marjan Kamali , Together Tea

“The red lamps on the metal stands swung above them. Mina saw all the streets of Iran in her mind's eye, hundreds and hundreds of red lamps for the boys who died, thousands and thousands for the dead in that war, so many lives cut short. She wanted to tell her grandfather that her new country wasn't what he accused it of being. But here she was again, in one country wanting to describe the truth of the other country—knowing she never really could.”
― Marjan Kamali

“She knew how to swing her legs on that hyphen that defined and denied who she was: Iranian-American. Neither the first word nor the second really belonged to her. Her place was on the hyphen and on the hyphen she would stay, carrying memories of the one place from which she had come and the other place in which she must succeed. The hyphen was hers-- a space small, and potentially precarious. On the hyphen she would sit, and on the hyphen she would stand, and soon, like a seasoned acrobat, she would balance there perfectly, never falling, never choosing either side over the other, content with walking that thin line.”
― Marjan Kamali, Together Tea