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Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts

Sima and the Snake

Stop Requested

Return to the Sunrise Bird (Morq-e Sahar)

My father, Ali Asghar, was born in the northeast of Iran and raised in a house on an orchard. I had been there when I was a child before our migration and remember running around the yard. The small raised pond always drew me to my little reflection in the water. It was part of a Persian garden design meant to imitate paradise, my namesake.

Years later, as I returned to these anecdotes of my own childhood, I imagined how a lifetime on these beautiful lands would have compared to my mere six years there. When prompted by me, my father can speak for hours on it. About the stores lining the streets, the people frequenting the house, and the fruits growing from the trees. I remember, myself, being picked up by him to pick the ripest white mulberries in the yard. I think of the way those fruits must have stained his mouth with everlasting sweetness, in a way that distance and time could not erase.

Yet, as I time goes on and the autumn of life emerges for my father, I wonder how often he comes back to this spot in the trove of memories he has. I imagine him there now as a youth, washing his hands at the fountain, whistling a tune with a bird. The overgrown garden comes to life as he delves deeper into the ritual of memory.

In this piece I am exploring the themes of time, intergenerational memory sharing, and home.

Chronicles of the East York 50

The War

Gossip with your plants

The Story:

The year is 2999, on the brink of a new millennium. On the island of Baraan, the government, under the leadership of the charismatic and flamboyant Mayor Ungor, has implemented a new campaign to recycle rainwater in order to save water from the region’s water supply basins. Since the region’s geography is in a temperate rainforest, there is no shortage of rain. Each household has been supplied with a rainwater filtration system that collects and filters their water for consumption.

Mayor Ungor’s attempts at saving water is not without suspicion, however. As citizens collect rainwater, am unfilterable chemical compound called schem is being evaporated in the air from a secret government facility and entering the drinking water and numbing citizens to otherwise outrageous political events.

In fact, the government has begun bottling and selling the water from the original water basin overseas without the citizen’s consent or awareness.

Not all these actions are going unnoticed, however, despite the impact of schem. A growing collective of those not impacted by the chemical have begun to gather to discuss, spread awareness and fight against the evaporation of schem and other government atrocities. They call themselves The Xelwa, a non-hierarchical resistance movement.

Two eager actors in this resistance movement include Zehren, an on-the-ground agent working to disable the schem evaporation facility, and Qaji, an operations officer communicating with members of the Xelwa on their missions.

The Characters:

Character 1 – Zehren: 25 years old. Indigenous to Baraan.  Works at the library as a day job. History buff. Doesn’t trust the government. Prone to being over-emotional and crying excessively. Through this she found that the lactimal acid in her tears counteract the schem in the water system.

Character 2 – Qaji: 33 years old. An undocumented migrant to Baraan from Curi, a continent divided by war and a corrupt government, fueled by the Baraan Government. She is a mother to a young son. Her continental biology does not require much hydration and thus she is not affected by schem.

Self Portrait (with cheshm qorbani)

Andrew Wyeth Indian Summer master copy, detail