afterword

When I was a child, my father instilled a fierce pride about our heritage in me. The Persians, he told me, had one of the largest empires in the world, spanning through centuries and millennia. We came from those folk, as both of my parents immigrated to the United States from Iran. To be Persian was to embrace this legacy of empire with pride because despite everyone who tried to wipe us out—the Muslim Arabs, the Mongols, the British and French and Russians—we are still here.

It did not occur to me to be ashamed until my second master’s program, when I sat in a postcolonial literature class and realized I was living the legacy of empire in my daily life. Having been born and raised and now studying on stolen land, with a professor whose family had been caught in India’s partition, and being one of the few people of color in the department—all of these and more made me realize the empire I had long admired could not be divorced from these modern contexts either, despite their seeming dissimilarities. It didn’t matter that Persepolis was not built by African slaves; many Black Iranians are a legacy of the other dynasties that used them. It didn’t matter that Persians had invented algebra or been the founders of modern medicine or had written one of the longest epics in world literature. What did such accomplishments mean when there were still subjugated people under our care?

But what did it also mean that while we had once been an empire, we were now a hated people?

After the Muslim conquest of Iran, the majority of the country converted for fear of subjugation and violence. Those that did not, despite the persecution, hid their native Zoroastrian practices—a tradition stretching back to the time of Cyrus the Great—and those who would not hide or convert fled to India, to become modern Parsees. Farsi, as a language, was almost wiped out in place of Arabic, until Abolqasem Ferdowsi penned the Persian Book of Kings, the Shahnameh, an epic of about 50,000 couplets—over double the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined.

Fast-forward to the nineteenth century, where countries like Russia and France and England set their sights on the oil-rich country of Iran. Fast-forward to the twentieth, where the United States feared a socialist democracy in Iran spelled doom for their foreign interests, and sent the CIA to help instigate a coup.

Fast-forward to 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and a ban against Muslim-majority countries was instated. Fast-forward to 2021, where U.S. senator Susan Collins, in response to the storming of the White House, wrote in an op-ed for the Bangor Daily News, “My first thought was that the Iranians had followed through on their threat to strike the Capitol.”

What does it mean to be oppressed when you were once an oppressor?

I did not initially set out to write The Bruising of Qilwa to explore these issues. Initially, I was trying to use my background a scientist to learn how to write a short story, intending it to be a medical fantasy. But as Firuz began unraveling the mystery of the blood-bruising, so, too, did they have to contend with their role as a Sassanian in Qilwa.

I had initially designed the queendom of Dilmun, the country which Firuz called home for most of their life, as an allegory for the Muslim conquest of Iran, but with the idea of what Iran might have looked like if the invaders had never been expelled. Since then, as all stories do, these countries and peoples have morphed to become their own, but I continued to pose to myself the question I still do not have an answer for: what does it mean that today, the people from whom my parents came from are vilified and hated in the country in which we live, but once, however long ago, these same people subjugated others?

Firuz is not a hero, and Kofi is not a villain. Their ideological clash ends in violence, as so many often do, but Firuz does not come away with the triumphant knowledge that they won. They didn’t win. As they began the story, so they conclude it: a marginalized person in a country afraid of its own recolonization.

As a multi-marginalized person in the United States, I think a lot about this country’s treatment of the Other and the ways in which this country was built on the backs of those very people. And though I can trace the historical, social, and cultural factors from which many of today’s issues stem, I come back again to the same fear of the Other: a fear of resource loss, of morality loss, of dignity loss. An actual rather than imagined reality for so many people who live in this country today, including over 11 million undocumented immigrants, and so many more who are willing to feel that ostracism in the hopes of achieving a different and better future for their families.

While I only touched on some of these issues in The Bruising of Qilwa, I hope it will inspire a conversation about all the ways in which individuals can put aside their judgments and join migrants and other marginalized people to create a brighter tomorrow, rather than perpetuate a nation’s fears of drowning under the depth of a short but fraught history.

And I hope this story can inspire a little more nuance in these conversations, too.

— Naseem Jamnia

August 2022

Written on traditional Numu, Wašiw, Newe, and Nuwu territories