#farnaz

1. Our parents argued in a language we didn’t understand. We were born in Las Vegas or Teheran,

twin cities of fantasy and chance. My sister and I found our words in Long Beach, Big Wheels and Barbies,

Bluebird troops and kidnap breakfasts. A war forced our cousins to buy false passports, lose their savings.

We ate Chef Boyardee after school, hot spinach and meatball soup on the weekends. I yelled into a phone

so my Iranian family could hear me. I learned I was the silk carpet my mother didn’t own, the casino

payout my father kept chasing. I didn’t know until later the Persian Leopard was trapped

in the Zagros mountains after the Iran-Iraq war, in danger of tripping old mines.

2. I taught myself who I was by watching my sister carefully.   I worried when  

the day came and I wanted to say I’m not her. First out the womb,   she was named and I wasn’t.  

Her name is Iranian but sayable   by everyone. My name would wait. They waited until

they knew they had it right. Not Sheila, my mother’s veto. Farnaz, a name that made me lonely.  

We lived in between Iran and America, a customs declaration zone. By the time I was born

my mute parents wondered how to speak as Americans as they moved away

from the people who loved them. How could I know the dark inside their mouths hurt them, too.

3. My father studied numbers in the racing forms, and I bet following my gut. I influenced dice at the craps table

by spinning three times   in each direction while my father   placed his bets. Even now,

I’ll retell stories in my head one hundred times to end them right.   It’s a system.  

I came from the racetrack, ignoring   all the horses in the flesh. I sounded out   the names of long shots.  

The odds say Blinding Telegram will win, but I like the music of Queen the Fox.

I believed that how I got my name would mean something. I am still finding the names for some things: the youth my parents brought to parenting, the attention

I didn’t know I was waiting for, the word for wanting, feeling its deep hole. Such naming I have been slow to do. I am waiting until I have it right.

Throughout reading this text, I began to reflect on the “wilderness” of the different cultures that I have been introduced to as I have lived in 3 different areas and have visited 2. Cronan explaining wilderness being made by humans makes somewhat of a sense to me. We create these spaces to satisfy something within us that we crave and erase whatever history and belonging it had (Native Americans in this case). Israel is doing somewhat of the same thing; wiping away lands only to introduce a new “wilderness” in which humans come and manipulate in selfish ways. I see this as political and environmental as well.

I disagree with Cronan saying that “... our environmental problems began with the invention of agriculture”. I look at that invention in a different perspective where that act begins to bond wilderness and man; the act of planting a tree or hunting is something that the earth is here to provide. This theory then does not go with his thought on how man should cease to exist for wilderness to and vice versa. I do think that I have a biased and different perspective than Cronan to have such opinions as I see the true wilderness as a gift from God which man has selfishly manipulated to a point where one day it will become extinct and man will suffer - but that may also be an irrational statement to make. However, if we were to have treated wilderness with consideration we would not be in the boat that we are now. 

It was good but i didn’t love it like I found out there was another season and it looked so bad I was like Bye Y'all I can’t do this for another 50 episodes