Two-eyed-h
By Mahdis Marzooghian
In Farsi, we have an “h” called “heye-do-cheshm,” translating to, “two-eyed-h.”
But it’s more heh than aych. It’s meant to leave one a little breathless.
When writing this beautiful, loopy letter – my personal favorite out of the entire Farsi alphabet – start by drawing a small onion shape and then slice it down the middle with a delicate curved line, thus creating its two eyes.
Perhaps for a few seconds, one forgets this is an act of writing and instead feels like an artist drawing a tiny portrait.
It’s the same “h” that sits nestled in the middle of my name written in Farsi, like a heh bridge that connects the rest of the letters.
Many non-Farsi speakers have complimented my melodic mother tongue, claiming it sounds more like singing than speaking.
I’m inclined to agree because upon giving instructions on correct pronunciation of my name, I feel like a music conductor:
First, hum the meem.
Second, open up your mouth and diaphragm with the a.
Now comes the bridge. Sound out the beginning of heh by first scooping the air out of the chest and then carving the ending out of the throat like a deep exhale.
Then we have the chorus. Sigh out the dees at the end.
And finally, belt it out: Mahdis.
The two-eyed-h stares at me as if to say, “Why don’t you always write your name in Farsi? Do any of the English letters of your name have eyes? Am I even pronounced — sung, rather — the same?”
And I shake my head, “No,” because the two-eyed-h is the most difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers when it sits in the middle of a word or name, looking on as if to say, “Go ahead, I dare you,” and then judging the butchering of its gorgeously guttural symphony.
There was a time I used to betray the two-eyed-h. The ease of pronunciation for non-Farsi speakers was more important to me.
I consoled myself that it’s what must be done sometimes in order to fit in. The music must be sacrificed, the bridge completely burned.
You end up burning bridges as an immigrant.
Indeed, to be an immigrant one must always sacrifice something for something else.
And it’s often too late when one realizes it’s not worth it in the end. To silence the music of your name and burn the bridge that connects its other letters is trauma you inflict on yourself. As if it’s not worth becoming breathless over the singing of your name.
And so, I omitted the two-eyed-h from the pronunciation of my name, blinding it. An unforgiveable betrayal.
“My name is Madis.”
Yet I still feel heye-do-cheshm’s eyes on me, burning two loop-shaped holes in my back, forever branded as the music-killing, bridge-burning immigrant, neither able to return to where I came from nor fit in where I am.
I often — and with much shame — think how simple my life would be if I wasn’t a Persian immigrant and didn’t carry the weight of my roots and the grief of my history, my identity. Being an immigrant is traumatizing enough, but now add Persian to the formula and multiply everything by 3,000.
How freeing it would feel to go through life not worrying about the mispronunciation of my name, being haunted by the eyes of a letter in my mother tongue’s alphabet, or keeping count of my culture’s bridges that I’ve burnt so far.
How easy it would be to walk around the world weightless, free of my diasporic guilt and ancestral onus, perpetually homesick and worried sick about a land and people I both feel I own like my name, but have been disowned by like a child whose estranged mother no longer remembers her.
I’ve been away from home for so long, you see. She no longer recognizes me as her own, and rightfully so. Her child who left home at a young age so she could be adopted by a faraway land that would never feel like home. The initial betrayal. The ultimate sacrifice.
I think about how I wouldn’t have to carry any of these burdens like ever-open wounds that I lovingly tend to and nurse. How might I walk through life without that responsibility?
But I shake my head and know in my displaced bones this constant pain is worth it because I wouldn’t exist without it and anything that’s come by easily isn’t born from the amount of love and sacrifice I’ve always known and cannot live without.
And so I wonder what’s next after the sacrifice of my land and name? I’m not quite sure, but it breaks my heart to even think about it. Perhaps I have to sacrifice an already tenuous identity I’ve yet to build because I have to build it on foreign soil.
Why does it have to be this way? Why can’t I pack my bags and go back to the land where the scent of its soil is as familiar as the scent of my own skin. But going back will not be easy after years of absence and neglect.
So I crawl inside heye-do-cheshm’s curved cocoon and build a chrysalis where no one will find me.
There, I try to make amends, so that one day I may emerge as a butterfly, reborn to my land from heye-do-cheshm’s warm womb. And I’ll offer up the eyespots on my wings to heye-do-cheshm, replacing the ones I blinded. Reparations paid to rebuild the bridges I burned. Finally a sacrifice worth making.
My roots will be safe in the familiar soil I was reborn to. I’ll sing heye-do-cheshm at the top of my lungs and the scent that fills them is the scent of home.
END