Brave

“Be brave,” agha-jan says,
     when baba heads for the States.
It’s not a cry for courage
     but a plea to behave.
How easily the letters in our name rearrange.
Brave is simpler to say,
     simpler to swallow.
Brave smooths the edges of our identity,
     lets us slip into more respectable skin.
Brave is not the name agha-jan created,
     the name that means “good way,”
     that already implies there’s a bad path
          and we aren’t on it.
Brave is a sobriquet.
Brave is cowardice, evasion.
Brave is assimilation,
     and so our name remains.

“Be brave,” baba says
     when they lay agha-jan in the grave
     in the Islamic section
     at his request
          rejecting the West with his last breath.
Or perhaps he yearned to return
      to all he’d left behind.
Whatever his intent,
      he believed in God, but not the rest
           not the mullahs
           not the sheikhs
           called them pseudo-Sayyids.
Baba says he’s gone to heaven,
     and I learn the word “behesht,”
     the first of a thousand little disconnects.
He still doesn’t change our name,
     yet he heeds agha-jan’s words all the same,
     sheds everything else
          our customs
          our tongue
     except the occasional hasty salam.
But only when he’s feeling brave.

“Be brave,” I say,
     when a lover rings,
     waking me from a sound slumber
     to tell me her father
     has called me a name
     that tears me asunder.
Yet somehow I end up comforting her.
I’m in baba’s house
     collecting records of the past
     to gain my shenasnameh,
     desperate to go back.
I hang up the phone and notice an old ID
     with a photo of agha-jan,
     a man whose disdain for rancor
     flows through my veins.
I run a finger over the signature
     in its original script
     grateful our name hasn’t changed
     despite all the pain it brings.
And for a moment,
     I feel brave again.