SONG OF MYSELF: MY TIME AT THE IAW LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
This past June, I was lucky enough to join my sister, my mother, and my mother’s sister to attend the Iranian-American Women Foundation’s Leadership Conference. Being a 20-year-old university student, it may not shock you all that much to hear that I have not attended many events of this caliber in my time. In fact, to be completely honest: I don’t think I had ever attended something so important in my life.
Our femininely exclusive entourage was the perfect group; my mother and her sister, me with mine. Even before the actual day of the conference, with all of us working together, making the preparations for the big day, I felt our bonds made stronger by the whole experience. I will never forget that feeling of female comradery, first strengthened between my familial accompanists and myself, and then transcending beyond to the other women who were part of the conference coordination team; women I had only just met, and already felt a connection with. As the bond between biological sisters is the basis for all female comradery, I felt so lucky that I was born with my sister, and that I did not have to spend my life searching for one. I wondered how many sisters I could be for other people, throughout the rest of my life, for all the people I would meet in this world, who perhaps may need that affection far more than I.
On the day of the conference, I was overwhelmed with girl power. As one who grew up wondering why there were never any TV shows or Disney movies about Iranian girls, who would get in wooden sword fights with all the boys in my neighborhood, regardless of how much older they were than me, and beat them just to prove to them that I could, I find it hard to find the right words to express what this day meant to me. I remember being age 8, playing a pick-up game of soccer in some park in Isfahan, and getting told: “Step aside, little girl! This is no place for you!” They called me little girl, even though these kids could not have been a day older than myself. You better believe I single-handedly beat that boys’ team to a pulp, figuratively speaking. I recalled earlier that year, in my humble hometown in upstate New York, taking bets from boys who didn’t believe I could beat them in air hockey. So many of them crowded around the table, each getting in line to face me next (some even from the fifth grade!), hollering out in amazement each time I scored, practically dumbfounded at how a girl could be good at anything. To me, my undefeated title at the air hockey table was the result of simple facts: I just understood the physics of the game better than most kids my age, gender notwithstanding.
To this day, it seems, much of my life has been about beating men at the games they claim to be exclusively for themselves. Being a woman has always been an inescapable part of my identity. In the eyes of the world, no matter what I did, I was seen as a woman first, not an equal. But there is another level to that: my Iranian-American identity. I don’t have to think too far back to remember being called racial slurs, ones that I will not repeat here, or receiving death threats from anonymous members of my hometown in this country; the country I was taught to know as the “land of the free.” I find it hard to find the words to explain what it meant to be sat down amongst these successful, respectable women in the capitol city of that same nation that turned me into an outcast after September 11, 2001.
I cannot imagine what difficulties the IAW founders must have endured in order to reach this point, but they should be beyond proud of themselves, if only for this monumental achievement that is their Leadership Conference. I sat with scholars, entrepreneurs, journalists, human rights activists, scientists, and heard them tell me what I had waited 20 years to hear: that this country was mine, too, and that I was every bit as capable to succeed in it as anyone else. It didn’t matter that my name was hard to pronounce, or that I was inadvertently associated with an “axis of evil,” just because of where my parents were born. It didn’t matter that I was a woman existing in a patriarchal society, where the equal pay of women in the workforce is actually being debated in Congress.
What these women showed me was that I could embrace my cultural heritage, as well as my female identity, regardless of the fact that within the same city, attacks on both of those things were being plotted. They showed me I could not only climb the ladder of success, but also turn around and wave at the top and lead others to do so as well. I am not a person of many fears, but I try to govern my actions with reasonable caution. Prior to this past month, I believed that a practical mindset for my future meant there was a limit to my aspirations; that I had to accept the reality of who I was and my role in this society as opposing forces, that I could not achieve. Especially in the corporate field: I truly believed I had no chance. I am now looking forward to returning to school this fall, with a new song in my heart; the song of myself, and I sing it loud and proud, for all to hear. My head is held high, high as my new prospects for my future, and all these things are more than I could have ever asked from anyone or anything. Thank you, IAWF.
About the author: Maryam Seraji Op-Ed piece on the IAW Conference at Georgetown 7/24/12
