Status Updates From All the Parts We Exile

NEWFOUNDLAND MENTION!!!!

Can't be a book about Iranian Torontonians without wilket Creek ❤️

“You know, I always tell my kids, I'm proud of you. You don't owe me anything. I'm proud of you. I sacrificed for you, yes, but you don't have to sacrifice for me.''

“There is no preparation for such a decision, I learned. No way to accept, with ease and grace, that you may never return home again. No way to explain that you could go home, but the cost is too terrifying a thing. No way to language a gaping wound that merely deepened each time I thought about it. Instead, in the car, I sobbed and I felt the weight of loss.”

Coincidentally I had already decided to read this memoir prior to the situation in Iran but now it feels extra topical

“Maybe it’s a second generation thing: the gut-aching grief, the melancholic fury of living in a diaspora.”

“I tried to locate them within my carefully constructed maps of whiteness. Fingers moved gently, curiously, along the map, moving across mountainous terrains and white sandy islands, up and down coasts and across grand cities; there was nothing like Ren. I was looking at a map in search of a sun.”

“I'd wanted to believe that white womanhood could liberate me, deliver me into a world where a brown girl like me could feel wanted. That it could offer girls like Mom and me a chance at human dignity. But it couldn't. Shit, it couldn't even liberate white women.”

“To have loved and been loved so abundantly, so intimately and to have to leave it behind, with no plan for return. Would it be another decade before I felt their embrace? Would it be two? This place had changed me. Where there was love, there was now an accompanying ache—a deep yearning and longing to be with them.”

“To love and care for each other so openly, so vulnerably, so abundantly, felt commonplace here. I felt a growing deep reverence for the closeness my mother and her sisters had.”

“enamoured of the people and places alike. Home was an overflowing thing here.”

“The charm I saw in my father didn’t translate here, where there was often an undertone of hostility and suspicion.”