American Reflections by Eileen Sadati

For most of my life I’ve been hiding by shields

Hiding by the dream-like word of: American.

It shines like a glittering beacon off the shore

So sure, I stood by it, weary in its warmth.

It starts with my kin and the gold on their faces,

how they faded themselves into fated addresses

Year after year until they were dull.

Accents and languages started to pale

We dropped extra letters and mailed ourselves off.

Names like “Sadati” can cram between lines

But “Sadati-Sohi” gets stuck stuck on the tongue.

Its better forgotten, like dust on Persian rugs,

Than out in the light, 

where it doesn’t even fit in the flow of this poem… 

Lighten everything:

Hair, skin, the words on your tongue.

This is America so lessen the load.

You know how hard it is for them to keep loud,

brown women in the palm of their hands.

So scrub yourself down,

Your goals, your face, your mind.

Wash yourself away until you’re transparent.

And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can just be “exotic”. 

Shield yourself:

From the sun, from your history, from the idea of alienation

Iranian American became “ethnically ambiguous”

And enough buying, learning, and acting

Can finally push down our differences.

We mask who we are and put on a show.,

We live in a lie and pride in our pretend.

A circus that we think is a theater

The white man’s jesters think that they’re kings.

I poured bleach into my second-grade lunchbox,

trying to cover the truth and trying to turn my insides white

I stared in the mirror waiting for a pair of blue eyes to start staring back.

I wanted to see oceans with beacons on their shores.

But instead I saw darkness

And instead of fading into whiteness,

I landed on the beach.

The sand of my kin is replaced by the crashing waves of California.

White water washes over me,

Eroding a bit of a past life with every change in tide.

A cruel, petty sun hangs over me from the horizon

I wonder if these same rays had brought my parents to America

And I wonder if that beacon was really just a mirror?

And if all of us keep changing because we never liked what we saw in the reflection?