Sitting with an obsession

Reflections invoked by a movie I watched and recently loved which made me realize I have an obsession with "understanding-the-immigrant-mother" narrative/canon.

Okay, so it might come as a surprise to some that I did not realize sooner. This clear obsession I have with what I want to coin as — “understanding-the-immigrant-mother” narrative/canon. A canon that I suspect I became obsessed with years ago but like many things that live in my subconscious, it didn’t fully click as an obsession until after these past few weeks, in which I’ve been meditating on a movie I can’t get off of my mind — The Persian Version.

The Persian Version opens with a young woman named Leila getting ready for a Halloween party where she meets a drag queen she ends up having sex with. A drag queen who isn’t actually a drag queen but instead a cis-hetero man pretending to be one for the sake of an acting role + Halloween. What we don’t initially get from this opening/interaction is something that comes later in the movie when Leila bumps into her ex-wife in a grocery store. Leila’s life is in pieces because she’s navigating a gay divorce. The divorce is so gay that it is (of course) a product of the inability of Leila’s family, specifically her Iranian mother, to accept them as a couple. And, Leila’s inability to create stronger boundaries between her Mother and the decisions she’s made for her own life.

The movie plunges a viewer into a heart-tugging journey that flips back and forth between the present and the past showing first Leila’s childhood and later her mother’s (Shireen) growing up in Iran and immigrating to America. Two lives juxtaposed — different in so many ways but with so many similarities. It seems that after my brain consumed this movie, the final missing puzzle piece clicked into place and I could see the image before me as a whole — the narrative of the immigrant mother but particularly— the fraught and complicated relationship they have with their children.