Persian is Sweet

Farsi shirin ast.

فارسی شیرین است.

In my first week of Persian 101, my professor told us that this is what Farsi speakers in Iran say of their own language—that it is a treat to speak and to hear. At this point, the only words I knew in Farsi were mersi (one of many ways to say thank you), salaam (hello), khoda hafez (goodbye), and medaad (pen). I didn’t know the alphabet, which is the Arabic alphabet plus four letters, I didn’t yet know about word order or indirect object markers or ezafe. But I tried to take my professor at her word.

When I told people that I was spending my senior year of college studying Farsi, the dialect of Persian spoken in Iran, the first question I always got was “why?” I’d completed my language requirement already, with five brutal semesters of French. Farsi wasn’t required for my major. The answer I gave at the beginning was “for my thesis,” a paper I was writing about Islamism in Afghanistan. One of the languages spoken in Afghanistan is Dari, a dialect of Persian. I thought knowing the alphabet and some basic vocabulary would be helpful as I read books and papers written by people much more familiar with the region than I was.

I also decided to study Persian as sort of a compromise with myself instead of taking Arabic--which I'd been meaning to do for years. By all accounts, Farsi is easier than Arabic for English speakers to learn because it’s an Indo-European language, like English, while Arabic is Semitic. Persian only met three times a week instead of four. And most of the seats in Arabic 101 were reserved for freshman anyway.

But it’s true, Persian is not the most practical language for an American college student to study. Its many dialects are spoken mostly in Central Asia, in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, with smaller groups of speakers in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and China. Central Asian diasporas speak the language in pockets across the world. I wasn’t going to be able to use the language all that much in my day-to-day life, and I certainly couldn’t study abroad in Tehran or do a homestay with a family in Kabul. Our class size reflected the relative impracticality of studying Persian—my 101 class only had eight people, four of whom had family from Iran and had grown up speaking and hearing the language.

Once upon a time, as recently as a century ago, Persian was a language of artists, of academics, of scholars. The educated elite across central and western Asia spoke Persian at schools and universities. There is a strong tradition of Persian writers, poets, and artists, stretching back to the Shahnameh, a thousand-year-old epic poem chronicling the reigns of fifty Persian kings. The poetry of men like Saadi and Rumi is still vibrant and relevant. I joined the ranks of the millions of students who came before me, who learned Persian as a second or third or fourth language in order to access a world beyond the one they were accustomed to.

Studying a new language—Persian, French, Russian, anything—is to gain access to an entirely new world. I’ll never forget what it felt like to learn the alphabet, to watch as the loops and dots and curves of the Persian script gained meaning. For the rest of my life, these letters will mean something. I was too young when I learned to read English to remember what that kind of enlightenment felt like, but here I was at twenty-one, learning to read all over again and marveling at everything I could now write and read out loud. I wrote Persian words on whiteboards and in the margins of notebooks. At my job at the campus gym, I’d write my coworkers’ names in the Persian alphabet on sticky notes and hand them over proudly.

Soon, my view into the world of Persian became more than just the alphabet; I learned three different ways to say thank you, mersi, mamnun, and motshekeram. I’d greet my mom on the phone with salaam, mamanam, khubid? I learned little sayings that, translated literally, are so sweet and heartwarming. My favorite is khaste nabushid, which our professor would say to us at the beginning of every class: salaam o khaste nabushid. Hello, and may you not be tired. I started saying it to my cat: salaam o khaste nabushid, gorbeh-yeh kuchak-eh man. Hello and may you not be tired, my little cat.

Persian was also very, very hard. Out of everyone in the class, especially once I got to level 102, I had the least experience with the language. It would have been a lot easier to sit in the back and be quiet, but for some reason I decided to park myself in the middle of the front row, closest to the professor, and raise my hand all the time, even when I didn't really know what I was talking about. I think I was determined to put myself out there because I knew I only had two semesters left. So, I humiliated myself at least once a class period. Sometimes I'd stare blankly. Sometimes I'd stutter. Sometimes I’d lapse into French, the only other language I was accustomed to struggling to speak. Instead of saying va (and), et. Instead of chon (because), parce que.

We’d be commanded to turn to each other and discuss what we did over the weekend, and I’d frantically flip through my textbook to the vocabulary pages, haltingly saying man kar kardam va dars khandam (I worked and studied), while my speaking partner, a polyglot Ph.D. student from Kazakhstan, would tell me where he went grocery shopping and what movie he saw. During tests and quizzes, there would always be at least two words I’d forgotten or had forgotten to study. I limped my way through grammar exercises and left exams near tears, convinced I’d failed. The only thing I consistently felt good about was my handwriting. My professor told me it was pretty.

I was also insecure because I had no personal ties to Persian culture or to Iran, while most people in the class did. What right did I have to attempt to learn this commanding language, mangling it in the process? I felt like a colonizer, encroaching on a space I had no right to be in.

But there is a difference, I feel, between trying to conquer a language and letting it humble you. Learning any language can be a profoundly humbling process if you really throw yourself into it. Persian humbled me. The more I learned, the more I realized that there was so much I didn't know--about the language, but also about those who speak it and the places they come from.

In fall of 2022, right as I started studying Persian, protests broke out in Iran after the death of Mahsi Amini, a woman killed by the state “morality police” after being stopped for wearing her required headscarf incorrectly in public. Mahsa Amini was twenty-two when she died, the same age that I am now. The women and girls of Iran exploded in rage and frustration at a government that too often viewed them as second-class citizens, and people all over Iran took to the streets in protest. The state had no patience for this and responded with violence. Women and girls of all ages were beaten and shot in broad daylight, detained and imprisoned.

I’ve studied the political history of Iran and have taken classes about religion and gender. The first thing I do in the morning after I drag myself out of bed is turn on the BBC World Service podcast. So, this wasn’t the first time I’d read or heard about something like this happening—a movement sparked by an act of violence and responded to with more violence. You might say that I was desensitized to such news, as so many of us are. But I remember that these particular events, these particular stories, hit me in a place that I usually keep guarded. I felt sorrow and pain for these women who in many ways were just like me, who just wanted to learn and live and engage fully with the world. It's truly a tragedy, that a country with such an extraordinary history and culture, one of the great civilizations of antiquity, now is governed by a police state.

One of the movements slogans, chanted by women in the streets, was zan, zendegi, azadi, women, life, freedom. The slogan was originally a Kurdish rallying cry and was adapted by the national movement and translated into Persian because Mahsa Amini herself was Kurdish. I remember how it felt to realize that I actually recognized these words. Zan, I knew because it was one of our vocabulary words. Zendegi, I knew because it was a part of the compound verb zendegi kardan, to live. Baradaram dar Virginia zendegi mikonad. My brother lives in Virginia.

My intention is not to take these events and make them about me. Nor is it to claim that, because I spent six months in a classroom, I have the same kind of personal stake in Iran's politics as my classmates of Persian heritage.

This essay is about the power of education, the power that language has--even basic grammar and vocabulary--to bring us together, and the value of taking the time to consider and study languages and cultures that are not your own. Spending just six months learning a single language brought me so much closer to a place that previously felt so foreign. It shook my dusty academic perspective loose and made Iran and its people so much more real. When I opened my textbook and read a passage about Kamran’s birthday party or did an exercise with superlative adjectives, I learned small details about life in Iran, the fragrant bunches of mint, dill, and parsley used in cooking, the carpets made in Esfahan, the universities and apartment buildings of cosmopolitan Tehran, the apples and wheatgrass on the table for Nowruz. Someday I want to go to Iran--a free Iran--and see it all for myself.