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=> From Emil's Diary, July 1998

From Emil's Diary, July 1998
Posted by Jeff (Guest) - Monday, August 22 2005, 4:23:18 (CEST)
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Sorry Emil..I can't help but to share your diary...I just can't help it!!


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"A cool carefree wind blows through the yard where I write, but misses me. I feel the urgency to slip back into the story, to relate everything back to the written art, breathe poetry and symbols again, not oxygen.
Assyrian guests have just left. The smell of perfume still lingers over the table that was laden with fruit, chocolates, nuts, and tea. I thought: It is sunflower seeds that have kept Assyrians united all these years. Nostalgic stories were exchanged tonight of how fecund Iran's soil was that made the fresh herbs there in turn more pungent and flavorful. As I listened to the elders I could almost smell the very air of the Assyrian villages we would visit in the summertime to see relatives that had opted not to move to the cities. I felt the aromatic breeze of my childhood in Iran on my skin, and walked on dream dust trails.
They talked also of hints of the coming revolution in the seventies, which they had chosen to ignore, unwilling to accept that the life they knew was about to change drastically. The young who were home from schooling abroad brought ominous news of impending wars and uprisings, but the adults had too much faith in the Shah, trusted God, and could not imagine things changing for the worse. They assumed that the young were just excitable, went about their lives as usual, until conditions began to visibly deteriorate. What seemed unfathomable became the new regime.
How, I wonder, did some of us come to decide to leave Iran while those very dear to us remained behind?
We Assyrians set off for new lives in Europe, Australia, and America…
I guess I understand more and more when Assyrians aren't as frivolous and insouciant as Americans, or as confident. We have lost so much, and when something wasn't violently taken from us we were forced to give it up willingly. Should it take so many sacrifices just to be Assyrian?
Tonight I feel the division again, that eternal split of identities inside my body. The Assyrian and the American meet in a space that shifts as the forming continents did billions of years ago. Earthquakes! Emotional tremors that keep me in dreams that like clay and lava set and harden, then shatter and crumble to allow for new experiences, a new language, a different home, adopting, adapting.
I refuse to choose one culture over the other. I will not limit myself to one devotion that might imprison me to many prejudices. I will remain universal at heart because I am Assyrian and am not limited to one nationality. I choose the tradition of identification, sympathetic and emotional, universal acclamation. I am a citizen of hope. Here there are no borders, no documents, no wars and prejudices.
I am two, I am three, I am just as simultaneous as life is a constant cohabitation of infinite joy and infinite sorrow.
This I swear by on this cool residential night in the hills that cradle Marin."



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