“I ran from the country of my birth because I did not want to die. I am a child of state erasure.”
I was born on a war-torn block. Bombs shook the ground and lit up the sky. Fire hung in flaming threads from blown-out windows in abandoned buildings. Foot soldiers marched down the streets of Tehran, pulling Christians and other civilians out of their homes. Many people were dragged to prison and executed. We barely escaped.
We landed in London and I went to school with Europeans. I was different. The way I walked was different. The way I sipped my milk was different. Because I learned English backward, I got beat up every day, my jacket sunk in the sink every day. Every day I was angry. Every day I was afraid.
When I say I learned English backward, I mean to say that I loved the way the letter C curled like waves in an ocean. My kindergarten teacher used to make us draw the letter C in a box of sand. I paid attention to the empty spaces between the curves, and I felt a kinship with that interstitial zone between letter and no letter because I felt like my someone was no one.
“I survive by not living in the country of my birth, and it is this removal from which I write that gives me life.”
At six, my family moved to the United States. I attended a private Armenian school. It was the kind of school where the priests beat us when we laughed too hard or played too much. One morning on the playground, the ball rolled under the high priest’s foot. He stood over it and said, “Whoever takes this ball from me will get slapped!” I didn’t believe him. I kicked the ball from under his feet and felt his rough palm strike me across the face. Sometimes, I still feel my cheek burning.
I ran from the country of my birth because I did not want to die. I am a child of state erasure. I live, and I do not live, in the country where I was born. I survive by not living in the country of my birth, and it is this removal from which I write that gives me life. My name exists under the black stripe of a marker on some legal form. I turned that legal form into a book. I am a redacted person.
In the words of Michael Fawaz, “Is my blood and heart not document enough?” From what I say, am I not a redacted document? What makes us whole as human beings? Since my sense of self circulates in this body, and the universes embedded in my thoughts comprise part of my brain, can I articulate my whole being with language? My best guess is not even a fraction.
What I say is always redacted from what I think. In this sense, the practice of speaking is an art of removal. Lately, I have been thinking about my citizenship. I have been thinking about my picture: The one that represents my whole being in a snapshot etched into my certificate with numbers next to my name. The self in the portrait that surfaced that day. I woke up early and drove downtown. I had not eaten, and I felt like a heckle of birds were chasing me. There was an odd moment when we immigrants were sitting, waiting on foldable chairs stacked in row upon row. We sat in the middle of a big gymnasium, or was it a convention center? I don’t remember. But we sat there waiting for our number to be called after the pledge. There was a big screen of Donald Trump welcoming us to America. I don’t think anyone was paying attention. Everyone seemed occupied with trying to stay in the country. Does this document make me legitimate? Does it make my life more official, more valid than my own heartbeat? I have been chasing documents my whole life. None of this makes me human; it just makes me a certified number, un-silent but living.
“My name exists under the black stripe of a marker on some legal form. I turned that legal form into a book. I am a redacted person.”
It wasn’t until I got sober that I learned my inner child had created a fantasy world for me to live in, and that inner child protected me from a dangerous planet. Because I have been exercising my imagination since I was born, creating worlds that subvert reality feels natural. It is like having an underground language slashed on my tongue. When I write, I live in an electromagnetic field that carries a love affair with birds. I sing a lost ballad unsung in a messenger’s throat.
And now the un-silence of language pulls me like a painting stolen from an art gallery. The un-silence is quiet but loud in its ephemeral dark shapes of nonexistence. It lingers in the in-between world of what is and what could be. It is the art form between the letter C. The shape of the air after a word is said. The blink of a flashlight after it is turned off in the dark of the woods. The anticipation of writing what cannot exist in a world where protest is not enough nevertheless overrides state freedom: our limited liberty confined within a country’s boundaries.
“What I say is always redacted from what I think. In this sense, the practice of speaking is an art of removal.”
Writing is the flower axe of my being. I started with nursery rhymes and love notes to girls I crushed on. I began writing poems about feeling wounded, and I felt my scars open to language. I felt butterflies storming out of the gashes in my soul. I wrote about memory, friends, heartbreak, jealousy, betrayal, joy, and anything else that I experienced as a teenager, which is to say, anything I still experience.
My childhood was harsh. When I felt the world was unsafe, like the pavement could swallow me at any moment, I envisioned an earth that made sense to me. A parallel realm. A world where language could bend time and gravity. Where a tree speaks a thousand languages in half a second, and the sun kneels before the sky in its efforts to start the day. A world where a maze of inexhaustible moss grows over borders and walls. A world where an executioner loves you to death with a dandelion. I learned to unravel the world with beautiful textures. I learned to turn my silence into words and my words into silence. I learned to heal. I learned to write.
Arthur Kayzakian is the finalist for the 2023 Kate Tufts Award, and the winner of the 2021 inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, which was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is the recipient of the 2023 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also the winner of the Open Chapbook Competition for his chapbook, My Burning City. He has been a finalist for the Locked Horn Press Chapbook Prize, Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, the C.D. Wright Prize, the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and the Black River Chapbook Competition. He is a contributing editor at Poetry International and a recipient of the Minas Savvas Fellowship. He serves as the Poetry Chair for the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA). His work has appeared in several publications, including The Adroit Journal, Portland Review, Chicago Review, Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Witness Magazine.
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