I am traveling again

I am traveling again
I need to find my documents,
Those that do not present my black hair
And black eyes but
A tall and blond girl.

This time I have to make up my mind
Which passport should I take?
The blue? The brown or the green?
I have to take the right one, a passport
That can take me anywhere without the humiliation
Of my colored face
- Ironically I am a Caucasian
- who knew a Caucasian is a colored girl!


When I was born an Iranian
My identity got lost
At the emigration line
Where I stood nameless
For three years without a mother to nurture the teenage girl
and a shaky refugee status that kept me from
remembering what my home looked like when I left
my room and the paintings my father had painted
and the books I had inherited from his childhood.
- when I left, father never sat by my bed and never told the stories of the Persian kings again.
- and mother closed the door to my room and never dusted it as if I never once lived in that Iranian home.



I am traveling again
Soon I have to paint my eyebrows blond
to replace these that I borrowed
from a grand mother who long ago
died in a taxi on her way to visit her son, my father in exile.


I have to find the right face
to go with the passport this time around
Back in December 2003,
they asked me at the airport gates
why my Danish identity doesn't look right?
I had to tell them my mother has just died
And my identity was lost on the hospital bed
Where she pushed me for hours,
thirty years ago, without knowing
she was dieing on a hospital bed
faraway from her homeland.


Ah! Sheema!

Sheema Kalbasi