Su Catapult, la scrittrice di origini iraniane Naz Riahi ricorda il dolore, vissuto per tanti anni in silenzio, per la morte violenta di suo padre.

When we immigrated to the United States from Iran, my mother told me not to tell anyone what had happened to my Baba, to our family, to me.

I was nine years old. I’d spent the year before staying quiet and out of the way, not wanting to cause any trouble, not wanting to make things more difficult for her. It was already a bad, sad year.

Staying quiet in our new country was an extension of that silence, easier than everything that had come before it. I promised her I wouldn’t say how he’d died, why we’d left Iran, why we lived here now. But she didn’t give me an alternate story. So, I had to imagine the accident, the bad heart, the cancer—absorbable, familiar tragedies. The kinds of things that happened to all sorts of families.

Immagine da Wikimedia.