Once Upon A Time In The West or… the thin veil of a musical

language…

“Your parents tell you not to do something and your

government pounds it in your head to hate America and
you’re just like ‘why?’ And if you’re smart and if you’re
curious you think about it. And eventually you get a little
older—and I started listening to Michael Jackson and I had no
idea what he was all about. But Michael Jackson. You
recognize the songs and you sing along—you think you’re
singing along but you’re probably not singing the right
words. You’re making it up.” – Golaleh Hassanzedah

“I seem to be really drawn to minor keys. Some people

would say, well, they're melancholy or they're dark, but I
don't think so. I think they're richer and I get a sense when I
listen to a minor key that the composer has somehow
worked harder at it. It is, it really just attracts me and it's
true that most of my favorite pieces tend to be in minor
keys.” – Condeleeza Rice on WNYC’s radio show Mad About
Music

“If I keep listening to it I won’t be able to finish the

revolution.”
– Vladimir Lenin, on Beethoven’s Appassionata

When you see George Bush on television speaking about his geopolitical
chess game with empty platitudes and strange, circular logic it’s hard not to
tune out. It’s hard to feel like you belong to his strange world of
speechwriters and Neocon thinktanks. Global affairs become a distant
reality—an unfortunate political abstraction for even the most concerned
citizens. A world of General Patraeus’ reports and talk of sides of the aisle.
The attacks and defenses of George Tenet. Hillary Clinton trying to recast
her vote.
What the fuck is going on in the Middle East? Does it have anything to do
with ecstatic Sufism? The Muslim Order of Assassins? Is T.E. Lawrence
involved in some psycho-historical way? What about the Yazidis and their
peacock-god, considered by some Christians and Muslims to be the devil?
The history of antecedents is endless and the whole thing is unbearably
deep.
I grew up in the small town of Little Compton, Rhode Island. That’s about
6500 miles away from Tehran, if you’re counting. This story is about the
space in between—a fascinating collision with the complexities of Middle
Eastern culture. But it begins, of course, on the internet—the chaotic center
for true global communion.
It was July and I had a roommate heading to Budapest for a month and an
extra room in an apartment I rarely inhabit, so I did what any quasi-
respectable unemployed Brooklynite would do: sublet the other bedroom.
Subletting is a great way to supplement a rarely-existent income with some
paying company. And if there is one reliable and unpredictable medium for
bringing “disparate” people together these days it’s Craigslist—a wonderful
community of stalkers, perverts, unemployed web addicts, desperate
money seekers, bored office serfs and general transients.
Craigslist is the place to sublet an apartment. The results are generally a
bit unpredictable, though. My past experiences interviewing potential
roommates have been widely varied. A few personalities come immediately
to mind: the overweight and underemployed eastern European man with
greasy spiked hair and strung out eyes who was enthusiastically pursuing
holistic medicine; the straight looking blonde hair-blue eyes advertising up-
and-comer who rented the room and left behind creepy notes-to-self about
purging dark sexual tendencies and reading more Ben Franklin; a skinny,
pale guy who refused to talk, ate only chicken and peas, and stayed in his
windowless, furniture-less room learning Crowded House songs on a cheap
electric piano. Strange.
This time it was easy. Two mid-twenties females showed up—transplants
from Tempe, Arizona. They were friendly, sane and pleasantly charmed by
the “eccentricities” of our apartment—both the bookshelf turned secret door
and the out-of-commission stove turned roach motel. It was twice as many
roommates as I had expected, but they seemed like a safe bet.
Andrea and Lala. We agreed they would rent the room for a month and
climbed to the roof for a look at the city across the East River. Manhattan’s
skyline radiated through evening smog and it felt like it was about to rain,
as it does in the summer after it has become impossibly hot and humid.
“I’m really happy we’re here,” Andrea said. There was a sort of naïve
poignancy to her unmediated affection for the city.
As we began to talk, it became clear that Lala (an Anglicized nickname
for Golaleh Hassanzedah) had a fascinating narrative lurking beneath her
cautious introduction. It emerged in small fragments through the veil of
polite introductions: She was born in northern Iran. She described her
father as a “Kurdish rebel.” She had escaped Iran years ago and shown up
as a refugee in Arizona—a teenager speaking only Kurdish and Farsi.
Craigslist refuses to disappoint.

My own New England upbringing was tolerant and culturally well-

rounded. In many ways an idyllic country bliss. But if there was one thing
that I was well versed in during my pre-collegiate years it was the culture of
White America. I experienced it on all sides—from leftist ‘60s parents to
cocktail wieners at Thanksgiving. On holidays my grandfather would
elaborate on our Mayflower lineage, armed with the family tree as proof. I
was obsessed with baseball—and my mother’s second marriage was to the
town Little League umpire. I sailed on Cape Cod. I skipped class in high
school to eat Wendy’s French Fries. I played the twelve-year-old tourist at a
very strange Bar Mitzvah for the only Jewish kid in town. I shopped with my
mother at wholesale stores for frozen food.
I consider myself a product of that America, and I’m proud of it. But only
200 miles away from my childhood, I emigrated to the land of Sikh cabbies,
Dominican parades and limitless falafel variations, where I quickly became a
part of New York City’s communal foreignness and general outsider status.
But even in New York, a city hopeful politicos and documentarians often
refer to as “the world’s capital,” there are still so many lives we never know
—experiences we rarely consider.
This time it was Lala. As I continued to get to know her I couldn’t help
but thinking she would have insight into some of the impossible questions
that I find myself considering each time I open the newspaper or catch
waiting room flashes of international affairs. She was a connection not as
much to the politics as to the experience—to some reality beyond the fog of
beltway jargon and media babble. Born only a year apart, we came of age
half a world away, at a time when the simmering conflicts between America
and the Middle Eastern nations were truly coming to a head.
And so this story became an excuse for excessive inquiry and really an
investigation of myself by comparison. It is not an exotic fascination, as
much as a question of difference. Though isn’t difference at the core of
fascination? Of learning? Of understanding distance? And are we even that
far apart?
 Within a few weeks our lives no longer seemed far apart. Some, if not all,
of the affection for the apartment had certainly dissipated as Lala, Andrea
and I attempted to eradicate a newly discovered plague of bedbugs. It
began as constellations of bites mistaken for hives. A few days later Lala
was quickly vacuuming up potential bug-remnants as Andrea and I
drunkenly tossed cushions, rugs, pillows and an oversized couch out the
windows and down the stairs. The Arizona émigrés were having their first
taste of the unrelenting trials of New York living. No one could sleep at night
and each morning brought a renewed round of aloe application and hastily
sprayed chemicals. Bugs were rampant in the entire building.
While ridding ourselves of what felt like a biblical plague we got to know
each other. And I wondered about Lala: Was this hardship for her? How
does the social war zone of New York City compare to childhood fears of
harassment by the Ayatollah? Of living under Islamic law? Of fleeing your
birthplace? Of seeing your first WalMart? Of learning your first English
sentences amidst the dry heat of the American southwest?
In a way, this was answered without prompt.
“I’m not sure if you guys really want to sleep in here with so many
chemicals floating through the air.”
I had sprayed some hardware store bug killer around and the place
smelled like a chemical dump.
“I’m sure I was exposed to worse chemicals in the Middle East.”
Lala’s response was casual and matter-of-fact. She usually maintains this
disposition while discussing her tumultuous early years. At this point I really
had no idea how chaotic and trying her experiences had been, and I wasn’t
sure it was appropriate to ask. But eventually, my selfish curiosity got the
best of me and I convinced Lala to sit down with me on a number of
occasions and talk about her past.

On the first of these meetings we ate bland falafel and shwarma at a

midtown Middle Eastern restaurant. We talked about Lala’s youth in
Mahabad, the dissent and persecution of her family and the wild stories of
their escape to Turkey by way of Iraq. I won’t attempt to distill the events of
such a tumultuous life into a brief narrative here. They are inspiring and
unbelievable, but attempting to encompass them would be both reductive
and impossible. Many of them I would never be able to appropriately
recount. But, alongside tragic stories of her uncle’s political assassination
and first hand accounts of the frustrations of constant scrutiny under Islamic
Law were fascinating insights into distant visions of the West.
The funny thing is you know America’s name. Literally, you grow up
knowing the name because they have rallies—organized rallies. All of those
rallies you see on TV—they’re organized by the government. And basically
if you’re in school and if you don’t go you get kicked out of school. But
what they show are the forefront—the extremists that are all into it. But
they never pull out into the middle with the kids, especially when they say
something like, “Marg Bar Amrika” which means ‘Death to America.’
We spoke in detail about her impressions of America before and after she
knew she would live here. Its grand myth was always in her consciousness
growing up and somehow, she insists, she always knew that she would
eventually come here. America was a childhood fascination that seemed
like an eventuality.
But what I remember, growing up knowing about America, is if I watched
television it was literally Clint Eastwood films. It was American films. They
were censored, you know, no curses or bloody scenes or stuff like that. But
it was those films along with if I read or watched the news about America—
it was always negative. My impression of America was that if you walked
outside you would be killed.
So violent. That’s all you hear about. “A German tourist got killed in
Texas.” “Black neighborhood in Washington D.C. abandoned by
government because it’s so dangerous.” So I thought if you go into the
black neighborhoods and stand up you’re going to get killed. That’s the
impression you get. And the heroic era of movies—a lot of Western movies
—always Western movies. I don’t know, that’s what my impression was—
really cool to live in. Amazing. But at nighttime you have to be inside your
house.
It is fascinating to consider the popular art of America as the dominant
expression of our culture. From an early age it was this Cowboys-and-
Indians vision that dominated Lala’s consciousness. Her family had satellite
television and when Westerns weren’t on the Rambo movies played. She
also, like so many throughout the world, was thoroughly taken in by the
songs of Michael Jackson. It was her first musical love and she spent time
singing along to words she couldn’t understand.
The ever-blurring line between entertainment and politics must have
seemed obvious from afar. With Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone and
Michael Jackson as America’s preeminent ambassadors, who couldn’t be
filled with immense attraction/repulsion feelings for its particular
combination of creativity and perversion? Our frontier violence and rugged
justice? I doubt there was much surprise when a “cowboy from Texas”
became our president years later. The Actor-President Reagan had been
exporting Western script ideology through Cold War monologues since Iran-
Contra. Whether it was manifesting destiny in the Wild West or global-
frontiersman John Rambo’s attempts to reclaim the psychological baggage
of Vietnam, American politics were being communicated through the movies
as fluently as through political speeches—in some cases the actors were
even the same.
America’s myth proved inescapable even when Lala’s continental
relocation became a reality. She flew into Arizona years later as a political
refugee continually imagining, despite her better logic, that she would arrive
to the iconic sight of the New York skyline. But in November of 1995 she left
a snowy Turkish winter in a thick goose jacket and arrived in Phoenix. On
the way out of the plane she thought that she was being mistakenly led into
the engine room when she felt the desert heat coming in through the open
door. She was in the dry, open world of Arizona—a place that, even now,
she would only describe with a single word: flat.
Then our social worker told us—the first thing he told us, “Don’t leave
your house. Don’t leave. Don’t open the door to anybody. Don’t talk to
anybody. Don’t let anybody come in, because if you do they might kill you.”

The threat of death against Lala’s family involves a complicated history

centered on the story of the Kurds, a people that have remained largely
dispossessed and unheard in the post-World War I nation-state era. Unlike
the dogmatic anti-American vitriol propagated in the rallies of her youth, the
family ideology into which she was born rebelled against both imperialist
incursion and the oppression brought upon them by their own government.
The Kurds are in many ways a neither/nor group that don’t fit neatly into
history books because they have rarely had a say in governing the lands
they inhabit. Her father was a Peshmerga, a member of the Kurdish armed
resistance movement in the area that would be Kurdistan—currently parts of
Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey—though his own group’s efforts focused on Iran.
He had been exiled from his homeland under the Shah, during which time
he lived in Iraq and met Lala’s mother. But he returned after the revolution,
only to be reengaged to the fight at home.
As a child she would rarely see him. Her memories recall his absence for
months, sometime years. He would leave Mahabad and his family—
consisting of two wives, six sons and three daughters—and head to the
mountainous region on the Iran-Iraq border to fight as a Peshmerga and
work toward the cause of Kurdish independence. Mahabad was central to
the movement in Iran, having been the capital of an independent Kurdish
state in 1946 that lasted only eleven months before being crushed by the
Iranian army and having its leader, Muhammed Qazi, publicly hanged. The
city has since been a center for anti-Iranian resistance. The push for
Kurdish independence was reignited after the Islamic Revolution when
Ayatollah Khomeini pulled back on promises of increased autonomy and
became aggressive toward the Kurds, engaging an internal war that
continues today.
I just remember my father either being in prison or at war in the
mountains and coming home. He’d sleep for a week because he hadn’t
slept in months. Then he’d just recover and go back.
By the time Lala was nine her father had settled back at home after
another bout of imprisonment and become a merchant—a word she
believes was partly a euphemism for anti-government smuggling
operations. He was working with a friend farming outside of the city when
fate dealt a blow to his attempt at domestic serenity. Lala’s father was
driving a Jeep back from the farm with a friend at night when he
accidentally hit and killed a young Iranian soldier. The soldier was setting up
a roadside post as a checkpoint but had not yet noted his presence with the
customary fire. Unseen on the dark road, he was hit by the Jeep, thrown
through the air and killed instantly. Despite the government’s
acknowledgement that the death was a legitimate accident, the incident
landed her father in jail for a week, just long enough to have elements of his
discreet past exposed to the authorities. He was continually interrogated
after his release and eventually asked to provide information about the
details and participants of conflicts between Kurdish guerillas and the
Iranian government. Despite his gaining years and desire to stay with his
family, his distrust of the Iranian government and allegiance to the Kurdish
cause forced him to flee. He left police interrogation on a Thursday with the
mandate that he return with information on Saturday. On Friday he was
being smuggled out of the country through the mountains of Iraq where his
second wife, Lala’s mother, had family that could hide him away.

Lala and I wandered through Times Square after our meal. With all of the
oversized chain restaurants and oversized tourists, Times Square can make
you believe in some of the generic indictments of consumption and obesity
that are so often used to belittle this vast, strange nation. We walked
through a group of teenagers staring in wonder at the site of MTV’s Total
Request Live while a man tried to sell us discounted tickets to Legally
Blonde the Musical in a hushed voice as if he were actually selling cocaine.
Hearing Lala recount her life and subsequent escape from the Middle East
instilled the same feelings of exhilaration and exhaustion that occur after a
particularly captivating political thriller. More intense, of course, because of
its factuality.
But one thing that continued to intrigue and confuse me was the way in
which she envisioned herself in America. After all of her insights into the
frailties of self-righteous Islamic morality and vivid accounts of witnessing
pre-meditated ethnic murder she always came back to her two great
interests in life: fashion and music. She came to New York hoping to find a
career in one of these fields. As much as I would hope to reserve judgment
on either profession, I can’t help but see the industries surrounding each as
mired in superficiality and affectation. What could seem further from Iran’s
ethnic survivalism than New York’s emaciated fashion culture? Is there an
escapist element in the desire to spend your time away from persecution
doing something fundamentally apolitical? Did Lala not feel some obligation
to address the tumult and oppression of her past?
Before I am condemned for asking these questions, know that I saw the
contradiction and small-mindedness (not to mention hypocrisy and self-
righteousness) of this perspective almost immediately. As we walked east,
away from Times Square’s hyper-consumerism and out from beneath the
afternoon shadow of the MTV studios, I understood something about how
the spheres of life that encompass both Lala and myself had intersected. I
thought about Quincy Jones and, yes, I thought about the King of Pop
himself. Had they ever imagined, while in the studio constructing the
delicate groove to “Billie Jean,” that it would be an aesthetic epiphany
somewhere in a country plagued by assassinations and the impositions of
religious law? That it would implicitly represent a liberated world to a girl
who could only relate through a combination of youth’s imaginative wonder
and some vague Clint Eastwood-induced vision of the West?
Before, when we had walked into the restaurant, the man behind the
counter had noticed Lala—noticed her in a way that men so often notice
women in New York. And I, in turn, noticed him noticing her in a way that
can bring men a new sense understanding when you’re with a woman who
is being noticed. While considering the large part music had played in
Lala’s conception of the West I began to understand, too, that fashion was
an extension of that same dichotomy of restriction and freedom. Perhaps
casual city ogling doesn’t seem like the best way to emphasize a sense of
female liberation but it highlighted the way in which Lala, in a short white
dress and oversized sunglasses, exhibited femininity in a particularly
Western way—without forced modesty or male-imposed discretion.
Of course Lala wants to be involved in fashion. Of course she’s so
interested in music. That’s why she came to New York City. In truth that’s
also why I came here—to be part of a culture not bound by the mystical
code of an ancient text.
Suddenly I thought about Bush (and now Giuliani) talking about “Islamic
Fascism.” Sure, it’s all rhetoric and talking-point distraction, but the
condemnation of repressive cultural forces will always contain kernels of
truth. Of course there is immense beauty to be found in Jerusalem or
Mogadishu or Pyongyang or on 46th street—but you have to be allowed to
look for it, to experience it. It is not an excuse for invasion, corporate
infiltration or “democratization”—but it really is, at least, a reason to love
America.

I remember one day I was getting a haircut. I was probably six, I think.
And across the street we heard this loud gunshot. It was a chai house. We
ran across the street and all I remember was the smell of gunpowder filled
the whole place. And a pool of… I’ve never seen blood like that, a pool of
blood. Almost black. I couldn’t see who it was and immediately my mom
came out and said, “No. Go back inside.” And I was like, “But I want to see.”
It was actually one of my friend’s brothers. He was a rebel and even if
they’re just rebels and they don’t have a big role the government just gets
rid of them. The less there are the better.
When it comes to varied experience, living with the steady presence of
violence is the most drastic way in which the basic circumstances of Lala’s
early life differ from my own. Her father took constant precaution to shield
his children from the conflict and violence that plagued Mahabad during her
childhood, but it was unavoidable. Scenes of public bloodshed were
inescapable and they account for some of her earliest memories.
It is a fascinating disposition somewhere between composed and
desensitized with which Lala recounts these stories: her brother’s friend
gunned down while out walking, her mother shot by a sniper while trying to
provide medical assistance to an injured man, assassins jumping out from
bushes and firing Uzis at young men, families killed for depressingly small
sums of money. The experiences haven’t transformed her into a character
of either perpetually extreme behavior or hermetic trauma. And only after
extended discussion on the Middle East, and perhaps a few drinks, does she
become exasperated by recounting her own past or considering the region’s
present situation and the state of Kurdish life. Even then it is with sadness
and empathy, not vengeance or hatred, for a culture that she reveres but
also sees as plagued by senseless violence and the inescapable weight of
drastic ideology.
On another evening we stumbled past McCarren Park in Brooklyn after
further conversation and a bottle of sake. A playful phrase had emerged and
began to steer our conversations: moral anarchy. I had argumentatively
suggested what many devout and politicized Muslims in the Middle East
might posit: that there is something like “moral anarchy” in America. We
don’t have any real moral foundation. We often do covet wealth. We are
defined by individualism and there is no strict imperative to act toward the
good of the whole. The health of our stock market often seems to take
precedence over the health of our neighbors. I wasn’t suggesting that we
are a nation without morals—just that they aren’t required and, as a result,
they can be at times conspicuously absent.
To counter, Lala told me a story about an Iranian Imam that had been
kidnapping, torturing and killing twelve year old boys, only to mockingly
cook parts of their remains and feed them to his unsuspecting guests.
When he was finally exposed by a young victim who escaped from his cell in
the sadist’s dungeon, the Imam was not executed. Instead, accordingly to
Lala, he was sent off, in a dark twist, to be tortured himself for the rest of
his days. Was this true? An embellished cultural myth?
As with stories of America’s most notorious pedophiliac priests and closet
gay Republicans, there seemed to be some essential hypocrisy that acted as
an essential companion piece to so many of her experiences with religiosity
and self-righteousness. Even if America can seem without the same moral
foundation, she would suggest, the stories of violence, sadism and nihilistic
vengeance from her home are endless. The Middle East, for her, refuses to
be the exemplary moral force that it would hope to be. Her family remain
practicing Sunnis but Lala has parted ways with religious practice.
My mother thinks I’m going to hell.
She said it casually but it struck me as a strange confession. Sad and
confusing. Is this cultural truancy the inevitable result of self-determination
under liberal democracy? Is it the very definition of what the theocratic
governments fear? Is it what becoming an American is all about?

Lala left her home in Mahabad as a teenager under the cover of night.
Without saying goodbye to friends or family, she piled into the back of a
cargo truck and hid beneath a tarp. The truck was one used regularly by her
brothers as part of their job exporting chocolate inside and outside of the
country. Her mother, sister and brothers were all with her. Together they
drove six bumpy, non-stop hours until they reached the next city West on
their way to Iraq. Her uncle had hired men with mules and horses to take
them through the mountains and across the border. Sneaking across the
porous mountain border was not uncommon; Lala had even done it with her
family once before when she was a child. Her mother had been through on
several occasions to visit her family and, more recently, to see her husband.
She told Lala stories of men so poor as a result of the Iraq embargo that
they would pull seeds off of any vegetation they could find and mix them
with flour in an attempt to create edible nourishment. Her mother fed these
men bread as they brought her across snowy mountain passes.
At sunset her family began a long ride through the mountains, attempting
to reach the border before the sun came up. This time it was summer and
there would be no snow. The women rode and her brothers walked. The
roads were narrow and littered with landmines. Only the guides knew where
these landmines were hidden and they told stories of the many who had
met their fate off of the side of the cliffs or at the hands of a landmine.
They paid no mind to the sensitive ears of children. As an eleven year old
girl, the experience was as adventurous as it was frightening for Lala. She
was scared of her mule and her brothers teased her for not knowing how to
ride it.
As they began to get close to the border, her family fell into a caravan of
groups traveling along the route toward the crossing, each separated by a
small distance. While riding along the side of a mountain, someone in the
group around the bend ahead of them lit a cigarette.
All I remember—I had been riding a mundane eight hour ride—is this
flash. A really, really loud flash. Like a car accident almost. Everything just
kind of crashes and for a split second everything’s a blur. Your soul leaves
your body almost. Everything shakes and it’s so loud. You can’t see. You
can’t hear. I couldn’t hear anything. I fell to the ground and my whole body
was… There were rocks and this mountainside and my brother was pulling
me. He was just delirious…
Upon spotting the cigarette, the Iranian border guard began shelling the
mountainside. Lala’s group was not hit but the explosion ahead of them
shook the mountain. Her young mule became frightened and threw her.
The next thing she knew she was being choked as her brother dragged her
off the road by the back of her shirt. The children were not injured, but
Lala’s mother had dislocated her shoulder. Her mule hadn’t bucked, but in
the emotional intensity of the moment she had thrown herself to the ground
—imagining that her children were dying and wanting to be with them.
The attacks went on for some time. They found shelter as the military
continued to shell the area. They were heading for a river on the border,
the shores of which acted as a safety zone. Eventually they reached it and
spent the night sleeping in rocks adjacent to the water. The attacks
continued.
The whole night, it was beautiful, visually. It was almost like lava. But
the funny thing is the horses are used to it. They’re just sitting there. They
just sleep or sit there chewing on their grass or grain. They don’t do
anything. My mom found us huddled with the men—my mom liked to have
men around us to protect us because it was just her and her six kids.
In the morning small pickup trucks came. Her family was loaded in and
brought across to Iraq. The roads there had been well maintained by
Saddam Hussein’s government during the Iran-Iraq war and the ride was
smooth. Because of their age and gender, her teenage brothers were
arrested by Kurdish troops. They were eventually released when her father
found an Iraqi to vouch for them. Her family was reunited.

Lala told the story of her escape on the sixth anniversary of September
11th. We met without anticipating the date’s obvious relevance to our
conversation. She also recounted a story of having been clumsily
questioned by the FBI in Arizona shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers.
She was working as a cocktail waitress and as part of an effort to raise
money for 9/11 she wore a shirt depicting the New York skyline. The smoky
looking shirt was of Midtown—the Chrysler building specifically—at sunset in
the evening haze. It was a commemorative gesture, but to a drunken
patron it appeared more like a depiction of the Twin Towers on fire worn by a
Middle Easterner. The next day the FBI called her work and visited her
apartment after receiving a call about the shirt. Their interest was further
peaked when she told them she was from Iran. The 9/11 hijackers had been
in Arizona attending flight school and the Muslim population there was an
obvious point of interest for investigators. Interestingly, Lala’s brothers had
known who the hijackers were and had seen them passing through the small
Middle Eastern community in Phoenix. She told this to the FBI but,
strangely, they never followed up.
Aside from her visit from the FBI, the time around 9/11 was relatively
calm for Lala. This was not true for her mother, who wears a head cover
and had things thrown at her when she was out on the street. Her parents
also had to avoid the mosque for a short time because of bomb threats.
Belligerent emotion had become a guiding principal for too many. One town
over, in Mesa, an Indian Sikh named Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot outside of
his convenience store four days after the attacks in some strange form of
ignorant, xenophobic vigilante retaliation.
With all of this in mind we headed back to the apartment to meet up with
friends and again take in the view of the Manhattan skyline. This time it
was the immaculate Twin Towers memorial lights that we wanted to see. It is
a truly American memorial; its immense beauty is simultaneous to its
excess. The lights seem to shine straight through the atmosphere and
illuminate space—a ghostly spectacle that amounts to a sort of melancholy
celebration. The cold nights of the approaching fall were creeping in and we
decided to go back inside and listen to records soon after climbing up.

One night my friend Stefan and I were falling asleep in bunk beds in
Northern Montana, having spent the evening indulging in whiskey and
Canadian beer. We began having a speculative conversation about the
dreams of Condaleeza Rice. Does she ever spend time considering the
confounding implications of her unconscious? Does she wake up with
residue of unexpected erotic fantasy in the back of her mind? Is she back in
high school, revisiting the missed opportunities of an awkward adolescence?
Sometimes I get that feeling—that real 60’s kind of feeling that maybe
the world would really be better if she would take some time to just sit on a
roof somewhere, smoke some pot and speculate on the nature of stars or
the concept of time. That a sense of wonder would inspire in her distinct
feelings of empathy and humility.
She would feel overwhelmed, believing suddenly that her greatest
concerns of international diplomacy and its effect on market volatility were
somehow connected to her beautiful and frightening dreams. And that
somewhere Ahmadinejad was napping, imagining that he’d forgotten to
wear his pants to school—waking up embarrassed and nostalgic, longing for
his youth.
At least I know Condi is an accomplished pianist in a chamber orchestra.
There may be some humanity in that, even if it seems cold and aristocratic.
Lenin couldn’t escape the beauty of Beethoven. Hitler loved Wagner. Bill
Clinton reunited Fleetwood Mac. It’s strange, though, I can’t imagine Bush
even listening to music.

Last week Ahmadinejad came to New York. He stood at a podium at

Columbia and suggested that homosexuality didn’t exist in his country while
the university’s president flexed his ego by throwing the Iranian a thousand
well deserved insults. They were repelled with a mocking smile. There were
protests, a few sympathizers, and a media spectacle that made it feel as if
Ahmadinejad had spent his younger years in a Hollywood PR firm instead of
developing power around his Holy Cause.
Lala and I decided to meet and discuss the stories of her escape formally
for the last time. A certain confusion had set in about where it was all
going, for me and maybe for her too. It’s not that I believed that there was
a great revelation to come from her stories—they are simply the events of a
life—but I had begun to look for some purpose or truth in the telling. This
sort of searching is the writer’s ultimate vice. I wanted too much. I was of
losing site of the person in front of me. I needed to step back and listen to
the words instead of prompting the myth. In attempting this, though, the
intensity of our dialogue began to lessen. Something felt strangely flat in
our last meeting. Perhaps it was fatigue. Perhaps I had begun to know Lala
too well. The complexities of personality— contradiction, confusion, context
—they were all piling up. What is a story without myth? Without some fixed
perspective? It will keep changing forever and the story will just be the life.
But there was a basic narrative to complete and Lala kindly finished
telling me about her journey out of the Middle East. She lived for seven
months in Iraq with her mother’s family. They stayed in a home without
electricity. Her father was in another town, working to acquiring fake
passports and devising a plan for their escape. They were caught on their
first attempt to sneak into Turkey but succeeded on the second attempt,
wading through the mire of a newly watered cotton field just before dawn.
With false identities and no home to go back to, they eventually reached the
United Nations in Ankara. They stayed in Turkey, awaiting word on their
case, and were eventually granted amnesty. They left for America.

Yesterday in Bushwick a teenage boy was shot when he stuck his head
out of his apartment window. He heard gunfire and put his head outside
and someone put a bullet through it. There are only basic truths: we are
born somewhere into the world, created through the bizarre and wonderful
coital moment. We grow from a miniscule shape and emerge from between
the legs of a woman. We are toweled off, cut from the cord and introduced
to a place not of our choosing—a place that to some already resembles hell.
It could be just as easily filled with gunfire as with gated communities. It is
all out there: genital mutilation, species extinction, drug addiction, nuclear
weapons, global warming. War. We dream and lust and talk of righteousness
and know almost nothing about ourselves. When Lala was eleven she was
asked to walk across a mountain range and through two war torn countries.
She was asked to leave everything she knew and go to America. She went.
What good is it to meditate on the other possibilities of life? Free will is
intellectual gamesmanship—whether or not it exists, the conclusions are the
same.
We ate pasta and watched the Planet Earth DVD. A Great White Shark
jumping out of the water in slow motion, a dying seal clenched in its jaws.
Here we are. There is nowhere else.

Benjamin Church
Smith
October 10, 2007