Last weekend, Iran, one of the world’s oldest, most storied civilizations, was attacked by two countries: the US, which adorably is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary; and Israel, which is younger than Liza Minnelli. I woke up on the first day of the war to the news that dozens of schoolgirls as well as their teachers and parents had been killed that morning by an American Tomahawk missile targeting a nearby Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps compound in the southern Iranian city of Minab. I’ll admit I had never heard of Minab. Learning that it was in the south of the country, my thoughts turned to my father’s sister Roksana, a retired human rights attorney, who lives in the south. It turns out that Ahvaz, where she resides, is a great distance away from Minab, which provided me and my family some measure of assurance while my father tried to get in touch with her. Calls and messages weren’t getting through, a newly familiar problem ever since the Iranian authorities started restricting internet and phone access in the country earlier this year after widespread protests against the government, a revolutionary government at that, which itself was established in 1979 after a massive popular movement ousted the Shah and ushered in a cleric, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Perversely, Khomeini is the reason I exist. Were it not for his brutal regime, my father would not have fled to Paris to continue his graduate studies in engineering and would not have met my mother, who had moved to Paris two years earlier for her ballet career. On the surface, it made sense for two young Iranians to find love in exile, but the truth was that their union represented an affront to their respective families, who sat on diametrically opposed sides of the Iranian political spectrum. Their marriage, a humble elopement at a Parisian city hall, was, much like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a grand rebuke of generations of entrenched prejudice. And the fallout was swift. Relations were severed, funding for studies was abruptly halted, and my parents’ working lives began immediately—much sooner than anticipated. Four years later, I was born in Paris, a city that was home to a Persian diaspora who initially had rather glamorously decamped to wait out the revolution, thought to be a temporary affair, and who realized as the years dragged on that the revolution wasn’t going anywhere, and as a result, neither were they.

The author in Roswell, Georgia circa 1994.

Courtesy of Arvand Khosravi.

Within hours of the war’s commencement last week, friends started reaching out asking about how my family in Iran was doing, how I was holding up, and asking to share my thoughts on the war. I appreciated the outreach but felt strange about this sudden interest in my “Iranian-ness.” The inquiries put into sharper focus the fundamental question of my identity, which is not something I often grapple with, probably because most of the time I’m simply trying to live my life. It reminded me of the question most people ask me when we first meet: “Where are you from?”

I’ve always found this a difficult question to answer, mainly because it defies an easy explanation. If I answer “France,” the country of my birth, it belies the truth of my ethnicity. The blood coursing my veins contains no French elements, save the vestige of an exquisite Bordeaux from last night’s dinner with friends in Beverly Hills, a city within a city that you’d be forgiven for assuming is the official headquarters for the Persian diaspora in America. If I say, “I’m American,” I’m factually correct in that I’ve lived in the United States since age five and became a naturalized US citizen at age 18. It doesn’t, however, satisfy the curiosity of the unimaginative interrogator whose real question is why I look the way I do or why my name sounds the way it does. So, in an effort to preempt that inevitable probing (“No, but where are you actually from”), I’ve taken to saying, “I’m originally Iranian.” Thus, as it ever was, the struggle of a classic third culture kid, steeped in the language and customs of an ancient civilization whose soil I’ve never touched, living in a country that is, for all intents and purposes, home, but whose attitude toward Iran has always been hostile. I sensed that hostility even as a child. When I was 11 years old, I stood in front of a Georgia state court judge and asked him to erase my first given name, Ahmadali, an heirloom from my namesake paternal grandfather, in favor of my commonly used middle name, Arvand—largely out of a desire to avoid the ridicule of my classmates when the teachers conducted official roll calls at school. In my child’s mind, Arvand sounded more acceptable than the Islamic Ahmadali. It’s no surprise to me that the hostility I perceived back then has now turned into all-out war.

The author’s grandfather, Ezatollah Bagheri Vanani, grandmother, Tourandokht Danesh, and mother, Mojgan Busque, in 1964.

Courtesy of Arvand Khosravi.

I’ve wondered how we’ve arrived at this awful moment. The facile argument that the United States and Israel are motivated by a desire to spread freedom and democracy might sound compelling to someone lacking even two brain cells to rub together. Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville recently took to the floor of the senate to explain that, in contemporary Iranian society, “women are treated like dogs,” repeating the phrase for dramatic emphasis. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), on a recent appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored justified the killing of those young Iranian schoolgirls last week by implying they were better off dead than alive “in a burka.” Incidentally, CPAC has announced that “Crown Prince” Reza Pahlavi will speak at their conference later this month, an apt representative of the faction of the Iranian diaspora that believes bombing begets liberation. Perhaps enduring the toxic black clouds raining carcinogenic oil over their heads is the final indignity the citizens of Tehran must face before their ultimate salvation.