[Marxism] Trot-diaper baby biography: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

[Adam Richmond <adambrichmond@xxxxxxxxx>]

Memoir review: 'When Skateboards Will Be Free' 
                     
                     
                     

Lee Thomas, Special to The Chronicle

Tuesday, March 31, 2009



When Skateboards Will Be Free
A Memoir of a Political Childhood
By Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
(The Dial Press; 287 pages; $22)
Playwright Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's first book, "When Skateboards Will
Be Free," describes growing up in Pittsburgh during the 1970s and '80s,
amid the swirl of the socialist movement. The title looks forward to a
post-capitalist era when no money need change hands for the skateboard
young Saïd desperately wants, or anything else for that matter.

Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh left Iran in 1953, following the overthrow of
Mosaddeq, to study at the University of Minnesota. There he met Martha
Harris, a young Jewish woman from Mount Vernon, N.Y. They married, had
three children, Saïd their youngest, and fell under the thrall of the
Socialist Workers Party. While Saïd was still an infant, Mahmoud left
his wife and youngest son to fend for themselves while he pursued
revolution. 


As in any household where ideology reigns, debate - even open
conversation - rarely occurred in the Harris-Sayrafiezadeh home. Saïd
exists in a realm of forced intimacy - cramped apartments, few friends
outside the party - with his mother. He writes with tenderness, yet
Harris comes across as caught between political fervor and the stoicism
by which she deals with the burden of single parenting. Then there's
the near-hagiography of Saïd's father, a man who, though absent, is
revered as a noble sufferer for the cause. 


A childhood characterized by frequent uprooting, party meetings,
demonstrations, boycotts and Iranian heritage at the time of the Iran
hostage crisis seems fertile ground for a memoir. But autobiography is
only as good as what gets excluded. Sayrafiezadeh's narrative lacks a
coherent arc: Anecdotes are interrupted midstream and never revisited,
and the storytelling has a child's flat perspective; minor and crucial
details often receive equal billing.

The most disconcerting example occurs early in the book, when
14-year-old Saïd is left alone with a comrade from the party, a man his
mother hardly knows, and is molested. The passage ends abruptly, and as
harrowing as it is, is followed immediately by the adult Saïd's
contemplation of the relative merits of a brushed metal versus
stainless steel tissue holder. The disturbing episode? Not mentioned
again for the next 230 pages. 

Though he immediately selects the brushed
metal holder.

"When Skateboards Will Be Free" has moments of poignancy, the
difficulties of self-imposed hardship being one. In a particularly
dismal apartment that Saïd calls "the cave," he reflects that his
mother "actively, consciously, chose not only for us to be poor but for us to 
remain poor,
and the two of us suffered greatly for it. Because to suffer and to
suffer greatly was the point." If that doesn't make for a difficult
childhood, not much would qualify.
The Socialist Workers Party influences every aspect of the boy's
life; his father even runs for president of Iran on a socialist
platform and is briefly jailed. Yet there seems to be a lack of real
joy in the endeavor, not surprising given the constant outsider status
shared by mother and child. Saïd struggles socially in school, a
nervous, fearful child, plagued by bewildering circumstance. He gets
lost, finds that keys won't fit locks, and cannot anticipate how others
might perceive a political comment.

As an adult, Sayrafiezadeh could not tell his girlfriend the
difference between communism and socialism, nor whether he was a
communist. The author escaped his political childhood, but it seems he
never really understood what it meant beyond an absent father for whom
he longed and a mother more interested in tacking up flyers on
telephone poles than seeing her son's alienation. To a child, grown-up
fanaticism feels true, if utterly baffling. 


 

Lee Thomas is a San Francisco writer. E-mail her at books@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

    




http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/31/DDPE16ANE6.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle


      
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