God, the wrong kind of attention. How small one feels when given the wrong kind of attention.
I was sitting in a class on Victorian female travel writing, reading about 19th-century Persia from the perspective of a British lady called Gertrude Bell. I could feel the furrowed Swiss, British, and German eyes on me. “Ah, poor girl. I’m so sorry, I should have given a warning for this video,” said one student who was giving an expert presentation on the topic. And there I was, tapping into my people-pleasing reflex, telling them it was fine. I said it was all good. Though I was torn. Minutes before, my parents had finally found a way to call me amidst nationwide internet blackouts. My father’s first words, before even saying hello, were, “I love you so much.” And I had to carry those words into that classroom and open a new tab in my head to discuss literature, orientalism, and fatalism.
We watched the horrendous video made by Anthony Bourdain, in which a child narrator told the history of Iran. Discussing that dark, precious liquid “oil” that everyone wanted to reach… cutting to people eating brain soup in some shabby restaurant downtown. The whole problematic editing of that video fed another cliché into its prevailing Western representation. And then came that very first wide-shot scene that nearly put me in tears: Tehran from above. God, I missed that city. Why did I feel so little in that classroom? Why did it feel so awful when those eyes followed me with pity, asking if everything was fine? It touches a deep wound in me, this sudden portrait of inferiority. I am caught in a trap: I can’t stand people’s indifference toward what is happening in Iran, but I also can’t stand it when people turn to me, clasping my hands in theirs. It forces me to perform, to apologize for my sadness, or to overly thank them just for asking how I am. I don’t want to talk about how I feel, because I don’t even know exactly how I feel myself. And I definitely don’t want to engage in an intellectual debate about whether Iran was exoticized in the 19th century by Bell’s description in her travel writing.
As I’m writing this on my notepad, my fingertips almost frozen, I just want to eat a döner kebab, but my tram arrives. 😭 So hangryyyy!