This Freedom
I came to America 21 years ago with rose-colored glasses, a suitcase of memories, and my mother’s dreams unfolded.
I came to America with little English and a lot of bitterness because our struggle as new immigrants embarrassed me.
But I came with hope and from my mother, I learned that I was lucky, privileged, fortunate to be living the American Dream.
I am grateful, but… this freedom is not as pure as I imagined destroying Mother Earth and building walls stopping dreamers from dreaming a better life demanding documents as proof of our humanity forcing us to put up signs on our windows: “Hate has no home here.”
This freedom has been making me very angry lately with its absurd necessity for a right to bear arms because it hasn’t learned from history, because of deep-seated ignorance and fear and hate.
There are people dying around me and I am helpless, drowning in His moronic madness.
This freedom questions my womanhood again, forcing me to march on Washington again, to raise my fist in the air again because yes sir, I’m a nasty woman!
I come from Iran, where dreaming is forbidden, and execution arbitrary where a ticket to America is a ticket to heaven my parents brought me here so that I could be free so that I could dream and be who I want to be a proud woman, uncensored, and unabashed
And yet here I am again, my voice shaking with anger “My body, my choice!” this poem is continuing to get longer this freedom is reminding me of the very place I left
This freedom is breaking my heart.
Elaheh Farmand immigrated to the US when she was 11 years-old, leaving her birth country of Iran. In 2016, she founded Immigrants & Exile: Stories of Nostalgia & Longing (https://www.immigrantsandexile.org/) to create a space in which artists can share their feelings of nostalgia, longing, and exile.
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