“Think about ‘Home’ in both the physical and metaphorical sense that it carries to you, and in three lines, use only the words you had chosen to write an instant poem.”
I wrote this on the whiteboard while repeating it aloud. I had repeated this prompt several times, with short breaths, broken words, and my accented English. I noticed the students’ silent smirks when I mispronounced a word or used a verb tense that only made sense in my mother tongue, Farsi, not English. They giggled behind their history books, held their hands to their mouths, and mocked my accent. It was a cold day in late January 2025. This was only my second class with them, and I had already realized it would be the most challenging. My goal was to guide them in exploring the concept of “Home” through various theatrical prompts over the course of fourteen sessions, ultimately leading to a devised project that would allow them to express bold and diverse visions centered around this theme. I tried to ignore the discomfort and not let my vulnerability take over. Still, under the students’ gaze and laughter, I felt something shift. That discomfort instantly brought me back to my school years in a rigid and repressive educational system in Iran, where I was born and raised.
My mind became foggy, my heart began to ache, and I felt the winter breeze touch my forehead, the same winter that once swept through the courtyards of my old school back home. In that instant, I saw myself framed as a displaced person, someone with no soil left to grow a single plant. I had chosen this path of art, teaching, and theater to stay alive, to stay close to what I love. Yet even in this chosen work, I could not find the peace that might have felt like home. My face burned with anger, and a wave of suffocation overwhelmed me. I kept asking myself in silence: Aren’t the parents of these students immigrants too? Then why such fierce resistance toward their theater teacher, who happens to look and sound different from them, or maybe from their history teacher?
“Your time is up,” I said, turning off my phone’s alarm. “Now, it’s time to share your poems. Who wants to go first?”
It was dead silent. Nobody wanted to share. They put their pens down and folded their hands across their chests. I was extremely stressed. I looked for one of the students who had been very engaged during the first class and had openly shared her life experiences. I had even encouraged her to perform her scene in her first language, which she was so excited about. But no matter how much I searched for her face, I couldn’t find her. The lead teacher on site informed me that she would no longer be attending school because her family was afraid she might be targeted by ICE. I sighed and turned back to the students. Their presence made it clear they had no interest in continuing the theater classes. They just wanted to return to studying for their history assignments. At that moment, I knew I could not force them to stay or complete the prompts against their will. Art and creativity cannot thrive under pressure. That silent message, paired with judgment and subtle humiliation, left me deeply frustrated.The moment brought back memories of art classes in Iran, where rules were rigid, imagination was unwelcome, and my classmates and I had our feelings, creative freedom, and artistic enthusiasm ignored and dismissed. But should not art classes feel like playgrounds, spaces for exploration, growth, and the acceptance of many perspectives? Should they not be places where students embrace cultural and personal uniqueness through creative expression, where they are encouraged to question, reinterpret, and imagine unlimited? And if so, how can I nurture that spirit in this classroom, or other theater classes without putting myself at risk of harm or exclusion? What powerful force of repression had surrounded me, keeping me from sharing the full joy of my creativity born from being a woman, a storyteller, and an immigrant?
My twelve years of schooling coincided with post-revolutionary Iran and the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war. It was a time marked by political repression, social suffocation, and rigid laws that stripped away even the most basic freedoms, on the first hand for women, artists and marginalized communities. In that environment, art classes did not hold much value. The best student in art class was often the one who could produce the most accurate imitation of an existing artwork, such as an old Persian miniature. There was no room for discussion, challenge, or imagination. Most art teachers were chosen from among school disciplinarians whose main task was to maintain religious and political order by searching students’ bags for cosmetics, storybooks, or poetry. If a student was caught with lipstick or a book by an author banned from publishing due to censorship, they would not only be expelled from the promised paradise described in our schoolbooks but also suspended from classes for a week and ultimately forced to abandon their dream of studying at the country’s top universities.
Before the art teacher entered the classroom, I would go to the blackboard and write, in white chalk, a line of poetry by Forough Farrokhzad, a free-spirited and rebellious woman whose poems were banned at the time: “One window, one window is enough for me!” I would write it and whisper it silently in my heart until the teacher walked in, recognized the poem, and erased it from the board.
In the midst of constant anxiety, whether from the fear of being expelled from school or the pressure to achieve high grades, literature and theater became my only solace and peace. My parents allowed me to immerse myself in the world of theater, on the condition that I continued to study hard. In my final year as a dramatic literature major, I joined an underground theater group called Khaneh, meaning “Home” in Farsi. The group was made up of playwrights, actors, and directors who were forbidden to work under the heavy censorship and often violent political suppression of the time. We decided to bring our performances quite literally into the homes of our audiences, staging plays in private living rooms, always under the risk of being discovered and arrested by the revolutionary guards.
When I arrived in the United States, I carried with me a suitcase full of authentic stories rooted in resilience, along with years of experience as an actor and playwright, both on official stages and in underground theaters. In Iran, I had fought for the slightest breath of freedom to create art, to speak, to dream. Here, where everything is within reach and students are invited to create freely, I see that freedom left untouched. The tools to imagine, to empathize, to see the world through another’s eyes are all before them, yet they seem hesitant to claim what they already have. It was a strange mirror to hold, to realize that what once felt impossible for me to access is now theirs, yet they rarely use it.
I let out a sigh from the deep ocean of my heart, afraid the students might see me weeping. All these memories flashed before my eyes as I reflected on my experiences teaching theater, art, and language. I rummaged through my mind for the exciting tools or games I had once used to keep students engaged. But at that moment, I could not recall a single one. I had left that class feeling both furious and defeated, standing silently by the window, trying to collect myself. I have encountered challenging classrooms before where students made me feel unnecessary, as if my teaching held no value. But this particular class felt like a true failure, and failure is something that has always intimidated me. I did not finish the session. I canceled all my remaining classes that day and called in sick. I had completely lost touch with the joy and delight I once felt in teaching, along with my sense of self as an artist for a while.
Despite losing my interest in writing and teaching for a while, this experience, along with the social and political climate we are breathing in, made me reflect deeply on who I am and what my true mission is as a woman playwright in the diaspora. I began gathering the reasons why I had dedicated almost my entire life to crafting stories, and how I might regain the joy that once kept me motivated and nourished. It felt like having an active imagination in a state of full and lucid awareness, guiding me toward the core of consciousness. I was watching the film of my life while sitting at my desk, a blank page open before me. I remembered my sixteen-year-old self writing on the blackboard, “One window, one window is enough for me!” and I suddenly understood the wisdom hidden in that poem, the same wisdom that once helped me find joy.
That line of poetry reminded me that before being a teacher, I was a storyteller with a gift. As much as I once endured rigid and joyless art classes, I must now integrate my artistic soul into my teaching. No matter how distant or disconnected the students might feel from my accent, my teaching style, or the act of making theater, I must not lose myself or give up. By sharing my stories and finding joy in creating before them, I can transform that point of tension and pressure into a moment of delight for myself. And even if only one student listens, questions, and discovers my journey, that is enough for me.
Being a cohort member in the Teaching Artist Mentorship Program and participating in the many events it offered allowed me to embody this idea of embracing being both a creator and a teacher at the same time, without compromising one for the other for the sake of time or a perfect result, or in this case, a complete first play written by the students. Creativity may be born from many things, but one of them is undoubtedly joy.
To bridge my artistic and teaching trajectories, I found joy again while preparing to facilitate a theater workshop for the 2025 Day of Learning, taught in my mother tongue, Farsi, for non-Farsi speakers. It fills my heart with peace to explore how inclusion, in action, becomes a universal language.
The seasons passed one after another, and a year has gone by since that day of failure. This winter, I will begin the cold season with the warmth of creation, developing my performance Torshi: The body of land as part of the Gathering for Good Trouble Artist Salon, supported by the Arts in Education Roundtable. Through this performance, created in response to the twelve days of war in Iran this past summer and in memory of a poet classmate killed during that time, I will write instant poems in pursuit of an answer to this question: “What is home?”
من نمیدانم خانه چیست
شاید خنده ی بینهایت است
با چکمه های قرمز کودکانه
به وقت باران
شاید
شاید
I do not know what home is
perhaps it is an endless laughter
in little red boots
at the time of rain
Perhaps
Perhaps
