Spoken Word: When Writing Comes at Sixty-four, The

Frontiers, 2004 by Keshishian, Flora

Growing up, I never thought of Mama as nonliterate.1 Actually, her nonliteracy was the norm among the women (and many men) her age and older in Iranian villages, including Faradj Abad, where Mama was born during World War I. Many of my relatives, such as my older aunts and great cousins, and quite a few neighbors, also didn't know how to read and write. Mama was the eldest child in her family, and the only one who did not attend school.

In those days, school was not for everyone, and definitely not for the older girls living in the villages. Instead, the girls were supposed to take care of their younger siblings at home and to help their parents out on the farm once they reached age five or six. It was more important for them to learn skills such as weaving carpets, sewing, cooking, baking, or horseback riding, if they could afford to stay home. Girls who were born into poor households sometimes worked as servants and maids for wealthy families. At age seventy-eight, Mama proudly recalled that she wove one carpet in a month, carried home water from the well three times a day, and was a skilled horseback rider before she was ten. She was a "Kalantar" girl. Mama used the word Kalantar (head of precinct, in Persian) to mean brave and strong.2 By learning these skills Mama and other girls in her village also prepared themselves for married life. While still living in their parents' houses, they prepared a dowry. Thus, schooling was generally considered a luxury.

In Mama's time, birth certificates were not being issued, at least not in the villages. Few people would get a birth certificate before they were adults. In fact, when it was time for Mama to get hers, no one could remember the spécifies of her birthday, so she never knew the exact day she was born, though she had been told it was sometime in the middle of the summer during the war. In those days, poor couples might even claim that their young girls were ten years older than they actually were, so they would marry and leave home early. Even wealthy families didn't quite see any value in educating daughters. Why would a girl need education or a birth certificate, anyway? After all, they thought, she was just going to grow up to be a wife, after being a daughter. Mama was fifteen when she fell in love with and married Papa, who was fourteen.

Mama's nonliteracy was natural to me until I was about eight or nine, a couple of years after I had started going to school-an opportunity I had due to the changing times and because I lived in a large city. I became more conscious of Mama's nonliteracy also when I met my then-best-friend Ashkhen's literate parents for the first time: Mr. Sograt, who used to be a teacher, and his wife, Mrs. Satenik, who had been a student of his. I respected the father, but there was nothing unusual about his literacy. My father, too, was literate. However, I admired her mother, then a woman in her thirties, for her ability to read and write. She appeared much more self-assured and assertive than Mama, and I considered her quite sophisticated. But I never wanted Mama to change because she was perfect as she was.

It has been said that fairy tales teach children moral values, gradually introducing them to the real world. It has also been said that stories should teach children about bitterness, meanness, and the ugly side of human nature to prepare them for the harshness of real life. Mama could not read Western classics to me, such as Cinderella, Snow White, or The Little Prince, but she did tell me stories about her own experiences, her hard times and the funny moments of her earlier life, and these sounded like fairy tales to me. Mama's life stories became imprinted in my memories, teaching me about good and evil in a different way.

She used to put me to sleep by telling me incredible stories about her own childhood. Sometimes she sang them softly, like a lullaby, which I often mistook for sobbing, and then I would look at her face to make sure she was all right. My favorite story was about an evil woman who had put a spell on Mama, resenting her for marrying Papa. Mama said, still with anger and sadness in her voice, that in the winter she, Mama, would go out barefoot and sit in a puddle, staring at nothing for hours, and that everybody thought she had lost her mind. Another story I remember was about one of her dreams: St. Mary appeared to Mama, promising her a much-desired son after she already had six daughters.

Her stories were fascinating and engaging, and I would listen attentively whenever she told them. They never sounded the same. Her stories told us about the hard times and mysterious illnesses in her village, about the fact that she already had four children when Papa was drafted, and that she had to raise her children single-handedly, cook and clean, weave carpets, work on the farm, and take care of her old and ill mother-in-law. I used to lie down and put my head on her lap so she could stroke my hair as she told me her life stories. They sounded so real that I often felt I had actually experienced them with her. Many times, when she opened unhealed wounds from her past, I could feel the persisting pain in the pressure of her fingers on my head.