Originally published on www.cbcdiversity.com
I grew up in prerevolutionary Iran and immigrated to the United States when I was a teen. My new book, My Grandma and Me, is an homage to a peaceful childhood, when everyday activities are bliss. When I came to America, I was running from war and revolution. It took me a long time and a considerable amount of money to follow the immigration procedures and become an American citizen. All this happened before mass immigrations, revolutions, and wars in other countries had made a noticeable dent in the American psyche. These days the internet has caused a silent revolution in everyone’s consciousness and we are more aware of our global village.
Terms such as global village, multicultural, and diversity did not trend during my childhood. However, we’ve always known about one another, and we even try to communicate—hence the United Nations. But it’s clear from the recurring disagreements and wars that sitting across a table in a large building is not enough, and a multicultural mind-set is needed to prevent things from getting lost in translation.
Immigrants have the basic foundation of becoming multicultural readily available, as we already have to deal with two cultures. But the degree of immersion varies. I can only speak of my own immigrant experience, and I’m genuinely interested in both my Iranian and American cultures. Something exquisite happens when a person opens themselves to learning about more than one belief, one lifestyle, and one language. For me, it enhanced my relationship with cultures beyond the Iranian and American.
I’m passionate about writing from my multicultural perspective, which was bolstered by my immigration but fostered from early childhood through extensive travel and multilingual education. But why should my books about different people and places be worth sharing with the lucky majority who grow up in the culture they are born into? Because technology and ease of travel has now placed us in one another’s backyards, and whether we like it or not, we have become neighbors. If we refuse to know our neighbors and instead build territorial walls, we are alienating people who most likely share similar challenges and dreams, people we could bond with and befriend. Books about people we don’t know—or are afraid of—cultivate a multicultural mind-set so that when we meet these people, we’re more comfortable with their culture.
As a multicultural author, I write to help create multicultural readers. I hope my readers wonder, What would I do or think if I lived in the world of this book? Understanding how views are formed in different settings gives us a multicultural outlook that brings about respect, sometimes to the degree of advocacy for people we disagree with. And the ability to see a multitude of viewpoints prevents a multicultural person or society from permitting the absolute rule of a singular dogma. So let’s all become multicultural and relegate wars to museums. We all deserve peaceful childhoods—and adulthoods—with our beloved grandmas.