http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20090417_chesa_boudin_on_growing_up_radical/
Apr 17, 2009
By Chesa Boudin
When the revolution comes, skateboards will be free. At least that's
the line Said Sayrafiezadeh's mother used to avoid buying him a
coveted toy. Her response to his request is but a symptom of being
more committed to a left-wing, radical-fringe political organization
than to one's own family. His mother's line also inspired the title
of "When Skateboards Will Be Free," Sayrafiezadeh's gripping new memoir.
Pop is an Iranian immigrant who came to the United States on a
student visa and met Ma in 1964 at the University of Minnesota. Ma,
the sister of Mark Harris, the author of "Bang the Drum Slowly," a
well-received novel that was made into a movie, is from a
middle-class Jewish-American family. But it is Sayrafiezadeh's
parents' politics that define his upbringing. Throughout his life,
Sayrafiezadeh's parents are both active members of the minuscule
Socialist Workers Party. When Pop runs off to live with a female
Comrade 20 years his junior and to participate in the short-lived
secular socialist movements in the Iranian Revolution,
Sayrafiezadeh's mother creates a hagiography based on the absentee
dad's altruistic intentions and revolutionary zeal. The author's
father is thrown in jail for a time when the religious factions in
the Iranian Revolution realize they no longer need the support of the
socialists and the senior Sayrafiezadeh decides that all great
revolutionaries go to prison at some point in their lives.
Sayrafiezadeh's writing is lyrical and poignant as he describes the
ongoing separation: "There was something so immensely redemptive and
exciting for me to imagine that my unknown father was not just a man
who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice
but to abandon me." Over and over, weeks and months pass with no
contact at all. Then, just as the author begins to wonder if he will
ever hear from his father again, "a postcard will arrive from
Istanbul, or Tehran, or Athens, or Minneapolis, where he has gone to
attend this or that conference or to deliver this or that speech.
'The weather is beautiful here,' he will write in enormous swirling
optimistic cursive that fills the white space, leaving room to say
nothing more." These occasional emotionless postcards fail miserably
to make up for all the missed birthdays when his dad was just across town.
Despite his day-to-day absence, Sayrafiezadeh's dad is a constant
presence in the book. Pop is clearly loved and respected even as he
is scorned and reviled. Sayrafiezadeh describes him as "a socialist
missionary among proletariat savages, and all social intercourse
presents itself as an opportunity for conversion." The author's 30th
birthday is one of the rare moments where he and his father interact
face to face. "I assume he is going to give me a gift for my
birthday, and I look away and then down at my hands, because to look
directly at someone when he is preparing to give you a gift is
coarse, unmannered, and above all presumptuous." Pop then pulls out a
marked-up copy of the latest edition of The Militant, the Socialist
Workers weekly, and proceeds to sell it to his son, along with a
12-issue subscription.
Another writer might take the opportunity to voice pent-up rage
because of the skateboard denied, the Sunday afternoons spent
alongside stands selling socialist literature, the Comrade who
sexually molested him as a child, the single mother who attempted
suicide. But not Sayrafiezadeh. He turns his childhood deprivation
and adversity into laugh-out-loud humor, intricate human portraits,
and a book that practically turns its own pages. The time frame
alternates between the author's childhood and present-tense
adulthood, with the two threads converging at the end. There is no
apparent mystery or suspense, no single tension driving the
narrativeoften a fatal flaw in writing, but not here. The
unsatisfying part of this memoir is that the author never fully
reveals his own politics, his own analysis of the world. He deprives
the reader of black-and-white pronouncements about his parents and
his intellectual inheritance. But the gray areas are often
enthralling. The book consists of more than 30 short chapters, which,
in turn, are made up of countless short stories and anecdotes that
read like pointillism on the page.
One such scene comes when Sayrafiezadeh and his mother are homeless
in Pittsburg. They sleep on the floor of an apartment belonging to
Comrades from the party until his mother finds a sufficiently
proletariat job and an apartment of their own.
"The home my mother finally found for us was a one-bedroom apartment
on the ground floor of a small brick building in the middle of a
ghetto. To get to it our first night, my mother and I boarded a bus
filled with exhausted passengers, most of them black. We carried with
us several bags of clothes and a broom. I had never known anyone to
be on a bus with a broom, and I felt embarrassed to be seen with it
and began to have a keen sense that something had gone far
off-kilter. … Through the neighborhood we walked, with the bags and
the broom. It was very dark out, and I imagined that the lighted
windows in the houses were eyes observing us as we passed. Halfway to
our new home, my mother realized that it was past dinnertime and we
had not yet eaten and had no groceries, so we turned and went back
the way we had come, the eyes watching us return, and walked to the
Howard Johnson's. Sitting beside the bags and the broomI had never
known anyone to sit in a restaurant with a broomI ate a hot dog and
a pickle. For dessert my mother ordered for me, as a special treat,
an ice cream sundae in the shape of a snowman dressed in a candy suit
with a smiling chocolate face. It was disconcerting to be given such
a thing, it was not at all consistent with my mother's character, and
I knew in that moment, and without equivocation, that something was
terribly wrong with us."
They continue to live in Pittsburgh's ghettos for some time in a kind
of self-imposed poverty. The author fully realizes that his
deprivation is his mother's choice only when she comes up with the
$900 necessary to send him to Cuba with a delegation of Comrades from
the party. Sayrafiezadeh is uninspired by what he sees in
Cubaespecially the run-down outhousesbut relishes the basic
luxuries available upon his return to the United States.
"When my plane landed in Miami, I had to go to the bathroom. Once
again dread came over me, and I entered the airport restroom with
trepidation. I was flabbergasted by what I saw: The restroom was
spotless and bright. A wall of mirrors amplified the shininess. There
was also air-conditioning. I chose a stall and found to my great
relief both toilet paper and toilet seat. How absolutely happy I was
to be back in the United States. How thankful. And while I thought
this, I knewas I have many times in my lifethat this was the wrong
thought to be having."
Toilet paper comes to represent capitalism, and his parents' politics
are so deeply ingrained that Sayrafiezadeh's abstract childhood
preference for comfort leaves him feeling guilty.
Ma and Pop appear between the book's covers in all their
three-dimensional complexity and contradiction, and, perhaps most
impressive of all, Sayrafiezadeh neither loathes nor scorns nor
resents them. And yet his memoir of a political childhood forces
myriad questions about family: To what extent should parents impose
their views on their children? What familial sacrifices can be
justified in the name of abstract political struggles? Where does the
healthy balance lie between political commitment and family
obligation? There are no easy answers to these questions, and
certainly Sayrafiezadeh does not purport to resolve them here. The
difficult issues he raises are particularly poignant for me because
of the similaritiesand differencesin our upbringings.
As a child growing up I must have asked my parents thousands of times
when they would get out of prison. If they had been as dogmatic or
disingenuous as Sayrafiezadeh's parents appear on the page, they
might have answered "when the revolution comes." But unlike a global
socialist revolution thatwidespread nationalization of the banking
industry and global capitalist meltdown notwithstandingfloats far
off on a blurry horizon even for the truest of believers, my parents'
prison terms were set hard and fast by a state judge. A radical black
nationalist political group organized the 1981 Brinks robbery to
raise funds for its operations, but instead it left three men dead
and an entire community traumatized. Both of my parents were unarmed,
but for their roles in the tragically botched operation my mother,
Kathy Boudin, received 20 years to life, and my father, David
Gilbert, received 75 years to life. Friends of theirs, Bill Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn, took me into their family and became my other parents.
Before I can remember and with ample support from my new family, I
began to build relationships with my biological parents from the
distance that incarceration imposes. My biological parents arranged
weekly phone calls and sent letters almost daily. I had to go through
a metal detector and steel gates every time I wanted to give my
biological parents a hug. Yet my frequent childhood visits to their
prisons were joyful reunions that punctuated almost daily contact
with all four of my parents. Sayrafiezadeh's father, on the other
hand, used his political commitments to escape parental
responsibilities: "My father had again begun to disappear behind this
massive workload of revolution, and his phone calls grew increasingly
infrequent until they ceased altogether, and our joyful reunions
become more like occasional punctuation marks in long paragraphs of silence."
My biological parents made every effort to be involved in my life
even from the maximum-security prisons where they were confined.
Letters, phone calls and visits were the staples of our relationship,
but my parents invented creative ways to make the best of the
limitations. My dad told me adventure stories on the phone, and my
mom read books to me on tape. My dad encouraged me to bring homework
on visits, and my mom knitted me stuffed animals for my birthdays.
With the support of my new family we built the foundations for loving
relationships that allowed me to work through my anger at them and
move on to benefit from their support and affection. At home, my
other parents were deeply committed to their work, but both chose
careers that focused on children, families and the community: my
father as an early childhood educator and professor of education, my
mother as a professor and director of a legal clinic dedicated to
children and family law. The crime of David and Kathy left me with
the benefit of four loving parents.
Yet the facts that my parents made an effort to be loving and engaged
from prison and that I ended up benefiting from having four parents
hardly justify their crime or that they did it when they had an
infant son. Both Sayrafiezadeh and I grew up with parents who might
fairly be criticized for letting their political commitments
jeopardize their familial obligations. The issues raised about family
life and political engagement in the memoir remain unresolved. The
extremes that come to mind are clearly problematic: Some abandon
children to their fate while others dogmatically exert a specific
worldview. Most parents probably err on the side of enthusiastically
passing on to the next generation their own particular dogmas. But
few people would prefer a parent who passively failed to express any
perspective whatsoever. The goal, it seems to me, would be for
parents to fully commit themselves to their passions, political or
otherwise, but without either limiting their children to the same
belief system or ignoring them altogether in the interests of a
supposedly higher calling. All people are rife with contradictions,
but some live their lives in a way that makes a mockery of their
values. It is an unfortunate truism that those who are most ambitious
in their commitment to changing the worldwhatever their particular
vision or system of beliefsoften fail to start at home with those
closest to them. As Bertold Brecht writes in his poem "To Posterity,"
"Alas, we who wished to lay the foundations of kindness could not
ourselves be kind."
Sayrafiezadeh's parents were so committed to the revolution that they
neglected him, so focused on organizing the working class that they
failed to provide him with many of the opportunities they sought on
behalf of the poor masses. My parents took an unacceptable risk that
cost three men their lives and turned mine upside down.
Sayrafiezadeh, 11 years old in 1979, suffered from the stigma of
being from a family that supported the Iranian Revolution even as his
classmates were rallying against it because of the hostages in the
U.S. Embassy in Tehran. I still contend with the stigma of parental
incarceration. Both I and Said Sayrafiezadeh grew up without
television. Both of our fathers, and my mother, served jail time
which would have been avoided if they had put family before politics.
Meanwhile, both of us went to school with packed lunches of carrots,
wheat-bread sandwiches and yogurt while our classmates enjoyed
Twinkies, Wonder Bread and cookies. Both of us found ways to build
mainstream lives without totally rejecting our parents or their
politics. And we both learned that the experience of being an
outsider, of seeing the world a little bit differently than peers
did, of learning to love imperfect parents, has myriad advantages.
Certainly the lunches no other kids wanted to trade for kept me
healthy, and Sayrafiezadeh has a brilliant debut book.
--
Chesa Boudin is a student at Yale Law School and the author of
"Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America" (Scribner, 2009).
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