How I’ve Learned to Make Space for My Queerness and My Culture
Iranian American poet Parisa Akhbari reflects on identity, art, and family
By Parisa Akhbari
“The Day of Hope, hid beneath Sorrow’s veil;
Has shown its face–ah, cry that all may hear:
Come forth! The powers of night no more prevail!”
–Hafez, translated by Gertrude Bell
January 30th marks Sadeh in Iranian culture: the festival that falls fifty days before the spring equinox, when the Persian New Year, Nowruz, is celebrated. I savor the pause that Sadeh offers in the depths of winter. I stoke a fire and eat pomegranates and khoresht, and read Hafez to my wife, who doesn’t understand his ramblings, but gamely entertains me anyway. Sadeh is a time to honor fire and the impending triumph of light over the bleak winter nights—and to count down the days until spring.
At the heart of the Nowruz celebration—that glorious return of the sun at the spring equinox—there’s an altar called the Haft Seen. We display seven items symbolizing intentions for the new year and inviting blessings for spring. Sprouts, garlic cloves, apples, and other items are gathered to represent health, fertility, patience, and new beginnings. It’s rare to find a Haft Seen without a copy of Hafez’s Divān displayed. Hafez is more than a poet in Iranian culture. He’s prophetic, known as the tongue of the unseen.
When visiting my aunt at a family gathering last month, she pulled out a treasure for me: our family’s oldest copy of the Divān. The sight of it brought back memories for my grandmother: “It was my mother’s,” my Bibi jaan, now ninety-one, told me. I leafed through the pages of ancient Farsi print, which had been lettered by hand.
It was from the early 1900s, around the first World War. Some of the pages were jagged and unbound, many of them held together by yellowed tape. The whole thing smelled of dust and prayer, the handwriting of my great grandmother, Khorshid, inked on the first page.
“You can ask Hafez a question, and open the book and find your answer,” Bibi jaan told me. “But don’t ask him anything more than three times. Then he gets cranky.”
In her tenth decade of life, at five feet tall, with tight black curls and kohl-lined eyes as flirtatious as ever, Bibi jaan still laughs like a crow and is often at the center of the social scene at her senior living community. She is a belly dancer, a seamstress, a woman who pierced her own nose with a needle in her seventies.
And although she is somewhat forgetful these days, she taught me Hafez divination—how to consult the poet for answers—long ago.
I learned things from Bibi jaan the way many kids learn from their elders. I had to slow down to her pace, to the speed of fesenjān simmering all day on the stove. Like the dried zereshk berries she’d steep in hot water to plump and swell, I had to learn the virtue of patience to absorb her lessons.
At ten years old, I needed Bibi jaan to interpret Hafez’s lessons for me. I quickly understood that the veil between the two of us was thin, and the veil between Bibi jaan and God was even thinner. She saw things others didn’t—in her tea leaves, in her dreams, in the Divān.
One thing Bibi jaan saw clearly: poetry was our family legacy. It was in our blood. In 1915, my great-great grandfather Mohammad Reza Eslah and his family (including Khorshid, then four years old) were expelled from Iran, threatened with the murder of Eslah’s sons if they stayed in their homeland. Eslah’s offense? He’d written political poetry, and distributed poems that were critical of the British occupation of his town of Bushehr.
Exile had a lasting effect on my family, and I wondered if Eslah and young Khorshid sought wisdom from the pages of the Divān I now held in my hands, back when their lives were being uprooted. I learned early on that poetry had tremendous power. In the case of Hafez, it could divine futures, and in the case of Eslah’s, it could decide one’s fate.
At ten years old, I needed Bibi jaan to interpret Hafez’s lessons for me. I quickly understood that the veil between the two of us was thin, and the veil between Bibi jaan and God was even thinner.
Bibi jaan nurtured my poetry and spirituality. She taught me to turn to poetry and Hafez when I needed guidance, and I reached for them both, even when I couldn’t reach for her.
At twenty-two, nearing the darkest night of the year, Shab-e Yalda, I came out to her as a lesbian. “It’s not natural,” she said to me. In an instant, I felt that thin veil between us turn to stone. The unspoken language we shared—one of dreams and verses and slow-simmered wisdom—evaporated. I felt not only cut off from my grandmother, but isolated from the cultural knowledge she imparted.
When I couldn’t talk to her, I conversed with her through poetry instead. I wrote poems as fierce, loving, vibrant, and contradictory as our relationship. I knew she was steeped in pain. I knew that, like me, she was asking her ancestors, and Hafez, what could be done about the rift between us.
My understanding of Hafez and divinity has since grown to encompass the sacredness of both my queerness and my culture. Poetry has always held space for contradictions, and it grants me the expansiveness to be queer and Iranian American, fragmented and whole, grieving and loving my Bibi jaan.
I’ve found folks like me through the work and stories of the Queer Muslim Project. Hearing those narratives allowed me to understand my own wholeness, and to lend that identity a voice through the writing of my young adult novel, Just Another Epic Love Poem. The novel is both a love letter to Hafez, Iranian culture, and my bibi jaan; it’s also a celebration of the divine magic of queerness.
As I embrace these disparate parts of myself as a congruent whole, I’ve learned to let Bibi jaan exist in her contradictions and her wholeness as well. She is deeply loving, even as she grieves for the granddaughter she hoped she’d have. She asks about my wife when I see her now, sometimes referring to them as my “friend,” and other times, my “love.”
With this year’s passing of Sadeh, my mind turns to Nowruz and the new beginnings I’ll call forward with my Haft Seen. The items on my altar representing fertility invoke a more expansive view than the traditional meaning: fertile creativity, fertile ground for growth, and abundance in my life.
I’ve also added another item to my Haft Seen to keep Khorshid’s copy of the Divān company: a framed print of a painting by queer Muslim artist Saba Taj. In the painting, a young woman in a hijab stands under a golden archway, her head encircled by a gilded sun. The painting is reverent, deifying the subject, despite her wrinkled button-up shirt and the human softness of her face. Her gaze is set on something out of frame, and her skin and clothing glow rosy and bronze, as though she’s washed in the light of dawn or fire.
This painting is aptly named, “Hope.”
Parisa Akhbari is a mental health therapist and writer from Seattle, Washington. Her debut YA novel, Just Another Epic Love Poem, follows two queer best friends in Catholic school as they fall in love through the pages of a never-ending poem they’ve been writing back and forth for five years. When not writing or therapizing, Parisa can be found trying to replicate her grandmother’s drool-worthy Persian recipes, riding ferries around the Puget Sound, and dancing around the kitchen with her wife and dogs.
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