Alireza Borhan's Website

My relationship with my hometown has been complicated for a long time. I used to hate it, to see its people as unable to change, and its life stagnant and grim. It was the place that held me back and caused my loneliness. Tabriz was why I didn’t have a girlfriend, and why I couldn’t enjoy life and all its beauties. It was the reason I felt so isolated and couldn’t seem to get out of the quagmire I was in. This city was one of the many culprits of my shitty life. I hated it.

Then, I moved to Tehran. It wasn’t ideal, of course, and I never expected it to be. But the city was alive. It was huge, with all these people who lived lives that seemed so far from mine. Of course, I was mostly interacting with the rich, educated Tehranis, so I subconsciously ignored the poverty, the hurt, and the loneliness that prevailed in the capital. Hell, it was even worse than my hometown. And it took me five years to realize that.

These days, I am thousands of kilometers away from both these cities, in a continent far different from any place I have ever lived in. The people here party, listen to a lot of pop music, go on picnics in the summer, and walk their dogs with a content heart. These people are rich, even if they don’t know it, and the Iranian experience, no matter how much I or others write, talk, or sing about it, can never be truly understood by them.

But that’s not a completely bad thing. Being among these Westerners, I have come to understand my own cities better. And as therapy has lifted the depression I had sunk in, a light has shone into my memories of my hometown. It is no longer the cause of all my sorrows. It is a city filled with life, albeit also with its problems. It has history, culture, and a uniqueness that will forever be in my heart. Something that cannot be explained.

I’ve recently reconnected with the people I knew from there, and I’m reading about the great individuals that have emerged from it. Many of them lived within a less than half hour walk from my house. So much has happened in that city.

My heart aches that I had been disconnected from it. But then again, I was disconnected from everything. That’s what trauma does. Now, the light has come back. And it is beautiful.

It’s now been more than seven months since I moved to Montreal. And recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this city is similar to my hometown, Tabriz.

Montreal is well-known as one of the most bilingual cities in the world, and Quebec is famous for its resistance against the Anglophone incursion. Most non-francophones in this city despise this. But for me, it’s all a very familiar and, don’t tell anyone but, welcome environment.

I’m probably one of the most Tabrizi people in the world. My family on both sides is from Tabriz as far up the family tree as we can track them. Most of our extended family live in a couple of neighborhoods in the middle of the city. So of course, I have strong ties with this place, its culture, and its language. It is what my childhood feels like.

Now, Tabriz is the only one of the seven largest cities in Iran that doesn’t speak Persian. The main language here, instead, is Azeri (or as we call it, Turki. Or as linguists call it, Southern Azerbaijani). Despite being the second most spoken language in one of the biggest countries in the world, and the main one of my two native languages, Azeri is still very ambiguous to me. I was never really taught to read or write in Azeri, and all the textbooks and novels I’d read as a kid were in Persian. Although It’s normal for a kid growing up in Tabriz to watch a lot of cartoons in Turkish, which is one of the languages closest to Azeri, but that only helped me learn another language, rather than get more acquainted with my own. So, as I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to sense how much I miss this connection with my language.

Languages in Iran, like in Canada, can be a controversial topic, often mingled with racism. Some Persians accuse Turks, Kurds, and Baluchs of being separationist or racist, and many Turks ridicule Persians as being too fancy and soft. No one is in the right, of course, and it is the system that hurts everyone, as is usually the case. But the fact remains: languages are at the hearts of people. And the heart is a painful place.

So, I understand the Quebecois. I don’t intend to advocate for Bill 96 or any of the language laws that might be considered too harsh. Hell, I don’t even speak enough French to survive in a French-only environment. But that is besides the point. Because this isn’t about advocacy, but love and identity. I understand struggling to keep the existence of your language, the thing you use to think and preserve the soul of what your childhood has felt like. And I don’t think an Anglophone could ever truly understand the feeling of not having access to the world in your true language. Which is fine, of course. No one has to truly understand everything. But I do think that in this war of languages, Anglophones need to shoulder the responsibility of confronting their linguistic entitlement. Because, let’s face it, English is not going anywhere soon. Most other languages, on the other hand, easily could.