The Read: Navied Mahdavian, This Country: Searching For Home in (Very) Rural America
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
Read a review that made me want to read it.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. Exactly as described by the review.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It’s added some rich texture and detail to my own grappling with questions of cultural division and connection; I’m going to work it into the manuscript I’m presently revising. Any non-profit group or advocacy project devoted to the idea that people need to talk to each other more across lines of political, cultural and social division should make this an urgent read in the next few months, and read it with a mind to appreciate the difficult message in terms of their projects or commitments instead of just seeing it as affirmation of their commitments.
Quotes
It’s a graphic novel, so it’s pretty hard to wrench words free from the text in a way that does them justice. His website reproduces a few early panels from the book and gives a good feel for what the rest are like.
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
The book is a story of a couple who left the Bay Area to live in a tiny-house cabin in rural Idaho, since both of them could do their work remotely. (They went pre-pandemic, in 2016.)
The author’s parents were immigrants from Iran; Mahdavian grew up in Florida. They didn’t move to Idaho with the intent to change anything but the conditions of their own life, but in after three years come to the conclusion that they’re not comfortable with “pointed questions”, “stares” and “feeling like an alien” for their newborn daughter even if they’re able to endure that for themselves. So it’s back to the city (Salt Lake City in specific) at the end of the story.
It’s a very sensitive account and also full of a kind of poetic, reflective exploration of their experience simply living as they did; the intercultural questions are frequently shoved to the side for other kinds of exploration of the life they lived. I often found myself thinking, “Maybe that would be a good thing for me to do” because I wouldn’t have the Iranian name or the look that invites the question or the comment. There’s a lot about the experience that seems alluring. But I’d have the same issues of not knowing which end was up for a gun, not knowing how to live on that land or that place, of feeling like a vaguely unwelcome stranger. This is one more narrative in a kind of mini-genre, “the city person moves to the countryside and finds themselves at a loss”. They seem less naive or judgmental than many other authors in that genre, and also less self-hating at the same time. (e.g., some works of this kind amount to confessions of snobbery, a submission to the nature of the local rural, a shucking-off of the author’s previous self.)
There’s a sign that Mahdavian reproduces that he came across that I think wasn’t aimed at him personally, though he’s clearly in the subset of people the sign was aimed at. It says, basically, “We like the way it is here; if you’re from somewhere else, accept things they way they are or go back where you came from”. Mahdavian pointedly reproduces a Native American pictograph that he recounted visiting just a few pages as an answer to the sign, but the sign kind of speaks to the heart of so much of what is going on in the United States right now. (Mahdavian’s caption: “Who owns this country?”)
It’s kind of hard to question the sentiment behind the sign on one level. Isn’t that what any of us mean by sovereignty when we associate it with community? That the people who are in community right now have a right to have a say, maybe the say, in what their community becomes? Many people recognized that there was something uncomfortable when Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers relocated en masse to Wasco County, Oregon in the 1980s, though much of that discomfort might center on the legal and civic misconduct of his staff and followers (which he himself asked authorities to investigate)—when there’s a sudden influx of newcomers into a long-established community that leads to dramatic changes in the culture, look and affordability of life there, that seems wrong in some way. (Progressives have no trouble recognizing that issue if it’s framed in terms of gentrification, for example.)
So that’s one thing that the book helps to open up as a thought. How free should we be to move into a community where we are very different in many ways from the people who are already there? The book is wonderful at opening up the paradox that he and his wife are simultaneously welcomed by neighbors and townsfolk who are generous and warm and helpful to them at the same time that those people show no interest in what the Mahdavians do or think or feel about much of anything and make no solicitious gestures of inclusion as part of their welcome. But then again, I’m not terribly sure that those of us who fancy ourselves pluralistic, cosmopolitan liberals are any more welcoming either. I’m not talking here about the tediously disingenuous kind of trolling that people yelling about “viewpoint diversity” in academia are engaged in, but it’s perfectly fair to say that when folks move in to our worlds carrying histories and sensibilities and everyday cultures that are outside our ken, we tend to talk right past them or look at them funny or say incidentally appalling things in front of them.
On the other other hand, at least the way I read it, this makes pretty clear that people who do agree they ought to try to be pluralistic, or who would feel bad if you told them they’d let their own prejudices lead them into hostility, incuriosity, or ignorance are not “all Americans”, that there’s also a profound asymmetry here. E.g., Mahdavian is interested in how his neighbors think and live, and willing to investigate his own ignorance; they absolutely aren’t, and that’s not just a function of him needing to be the one to adapt to them. That’s the ground on which most calls to create bridges across divides fail: the only people who respond positively to those calls are people who believe in the value of those bridges, and thus, are really not the problem when it comes to division. Political division is only the beginning of the divergences that incidentally creep in around the edges of the time recounted in this book.
It’s a book full of sentiment and beauty that I think somehow escapes being sentimental, for which I was very grateful as a reader. I also think it evades the twin demons of sanctimony and self-congratulation. It’s the story of an impulsive (and economically pragmatic) decision that comes without the heavy burden of a strong agenda—this isn’t the kind of pretention involved in Tolstoy disguising himself as a peasant. Though I think he understates how this time was essential to Emelie Mahdavian’s film “Bitterbrush”, which gives you another incidental window into their time there. But that’s her story to tell, not his.