Ma Miaeem va Miravim (We Come and Go)

Ma Miaeem va Miravim (We Come and Go) is an artist book and a series of drawings that translate my first-grade English textbook, We Come and Go, from the Dick and Jane series into Persian-English, in which Persian words are written using the Roman alphabet. The title phrase ‘Ma Miaeem va Miravim’ is the Persian-English translation of ‘We Come and Go.’ The children’s names, Dick, Jane, and Sally, were replaced by Iranian names, Babak, Mina, and Leila. The colourful homogenized illustrations from the sourcebook, We Come and Go, are reproduced in black and white with some thematic changes and translations. Several layers of dark lines are drawn obsessively using graphite pencil to cover the parts of the images that depict children playing outside in ways that contrast with how Iranian children played back then. For example, a few objects, such as North American toys like roller skates and a big toy car, are covered with dark lines. On other pages, a white picket fence is replaced by a tall brick wall, and a milk van is replaced by a motorcycle, as these were more common in Iran. This work reflects my experience of growing up in Iran and raising children in Canada as an immigrant. 

Nowadays, while many Iranians move to English-speaking countries, the availability of modern online communication tools has provided new means of interaction. As a result, many Persian speakers living in the West choose to communicate through online technology using a mix of Persian and English, forging traditional Persian characters and using the Roman alphabet to represent and express Persian words phonetically. Working with notions of “third space” or “the space in-between” and the globalization of English, this work explores how the use of the hybrid language Persian-English affects an Iranian sense of identity in a globalized world. Furthermore, it investigates the socio-cultural implications of hybridity as they relate to interethnic exchange and the globalizing process of travel and translation.