47 Mondana Bonaccorso – Literacy Narrative
Mondana Bonaccorso (She / Her) is a Graduate Student from Louisville, KY, and she is an English teacher at North Oldham High. This is her final semester completing a Master of English, which will be her third master’s degree. This Narrative was prepared for Professor Kelly Blewett’s W509, Introduction to Literacy Studies. Kelly states, “The vividness and gut-wrenching writing in this piece set it apart, and I am amazed by Mondana’s resilience. What an unforgettable essay!”
Literacy Narrative
I was born in Tacoma Park, Maryland in 1964 and, by my third birthday, I already had an acute awareness of the oil-mixed-with-water discordance in our family – and of my parents’ respective tempers, which catapulted me back and forth inside a never-ending cycle of violence and mayhem, wondering, although they rarely spanked me, why my mom and dad came to physical blows over the most trivial of things. Toys strewn across the floor or a bed not made was enough to precipitate my Persian father’s tirades, met with an equally irascible, acid-laced retort from my American mother, her razor-sharp sarcasm as flammable as oil spewed into a combustible fire. She was an independent woman raised in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky giving scant regard for the bellowing directives of her foreigner husband.
We didn’t exactly fit the stereotypical demographics for familial chaos. My parents were both educated, earned good money, didn’t drink. As a Middle Eastern man, my father was not religious, but cultural differences became a key factor in many of the problems facing my parents. I never knew exactly when the next combustion would ignite-only that it would as sure as the sun rose every day. The yelling, the screaming, the hate-filled insults, inevitably leading to shoving, hitting, punching, hair-pulling, scratching. Doors being slammed, and objects smashed against walls…and Mom holed up in the bathroom, the only place she could hide that had a lock, and my three-year-old self, my body pressed up against the door waiting until she came out.
I guess I should have counted myself lucky to never have been the object of their physical violence, but living day in and day out in a world filled with that kind of heart-pounding, gasping-for-air, nauseating type of fear that stuns the senses into a paralytic atrophy, the jolt that renders one too afraid to breathe or swallow or utter a sound…living everyday consumed inside a nightmare that choked at my throat any time either my mother or my father would arrive home and walk through the door, leaving me suspended in time, with nowhere firm to anchor myself to the sort of banal stability that all children secretly yearn for. We moved to Iran six months after my sister was born, and settled into our new home in a fashionable suburb of Tehran.
The Nowruz celebrations of ’69 did not go as planned. It had rained all night, so Dad was forced to take down the outdoor decorations he had carefully hung the day before. After bringing in the lights, lanterns, and chairs, he dried everything and rearranged the furniture and I helped him the best I could. Mom had spent the day upstairs, cocooned in her room, as she often did whenever Dad entertained family or friends. March 19th was not only the Persian New Year, but also the long-awaited house-warming party that Dad had been preparing for weeks. I did my best to stay out of his way as he set out the fruit platters and chopped and prepped the meat and vegetables for the four signature dishes he had begun to cook, Persian stews taking hours of meticulous attention, my father celebrated as a culinary “maestro” within his social circle.
By 1:00 pm, guests started arriving and Dad had let Mom sleep late in the hope that her mood would improve, but when my grandparents entered and he ran upstairs to tell Mom that it was time to come down, she informed her husband that she would not be joining in the festivities.
“What do you mean, Karen?”
“I don’t feel well, Tom.”
“But you seem better.”
“I didn’t invite your fucking family – you did. I’m not coming down. You deal with them,” she said.
“You mean my family? You’re telling me to ‘deal’ with my family? My parents are here, Sweetheart. Everyone has come to spend Nowruz in our home, to be with you and the girls. Please come down, Karen. I’m asking you.”
My mother ignored my father’s pleas, instead, rolling over to continue reading her book.
“Shut the door, Tom. I’m not seeing anyone.”
My father described walking down the stairs as one of the most humiliating moments of his life. How many times had she done that to him? How could he face his family one more time to explain that his wife had refused to come down yet again, on the most important day of the year? He listened to his parents greet his cousins, aunts kissing each other on both cheeks, uncles bringing in trays of Persian sweets, nieces and nephews running around laughing. As Dad descended two more more steps, he could see his friends arrive and introduce themselves, holding platters of food and gifts. Everyone was dressed in their finest. Humiliation, mixed with indignation gripped my father and he began to feel nauseated, knowing what he would hear once he appeared without his American wife.
Mom had almost finished the third chapter of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse when the bedroom door flew open, banging the wall so hard the door knob cracked a hole in the plaster. What my father’s brothers said to Dad downstairs is anyone’s guess, but it must have aroused such a fury in him that can only be described as terrifying. My mother could not recall the moment right before my father burst in and started pummeling her arms, stomach, thighs, clutching a handful of hair, and dragging her down the stairs by her scrunched fabric of her nightgown waded up in his fist…
…or the number of breaths it took for her to compose herself as she slowly lift her head, a thread of spittle connecting her mouth to the marble slab of tile beneath her cheek; only that when she looked up to see her husband’s nieces, nephews, sister, two brothers, parents and cousins standing about her, shocked, staring at her as a pack of zoo-goers gawking at an exotic animal…she describes that moment as having an out-of-body experience where she was no longer in control.
How many seconds did it take her to pull down her gown back over her cotton underwear?
How many more to brush the hair from her eyes?
To get up on her knees so she could catch her breath?
How many deafening beats of her heart did it take for her to lumber to the kitchen, open a drawer and remove a large butcher knife?
How many pulses had throbbed through her aching temples before she returned to the foyer, lifted the steel blade and lunge at her husband, the weapon barely missing his right shoulder – and lunge at him again, grunting, a piercing screech emanating from her small frame with every strike, chasing the father of her children through the living room, howling like a crazed banshee, kicking over a chair, smashing a plate of halva as she leapt onto the glass coffee table in pursuit, pouncing on my father like a Kentucky wildcat, her hands clasped around his neck as she yanked his scalp, Mom taking scant notice of the female family members shrieking about her at the visceral sight of the crazed American stalking one of their own with a meat cleaver in the frenetic seconds that she made it her mission to carve my father in half. My two-year old sister and I had been playing with our cousins when we heard the deafening yowls as we turned to see our mother at the bottom of the stairs, blood seeping from her nose, my father jerking her into the foyer and dumping her in a crumpled heap like a bundle of dirty laundry, our relatives staring at my mom’s exposed buttocks and thighs.
By everyone’s account, it had taken my mother only a few minutes to chase my father through the house before my two uncles were able to shove their psychopathic sister-in-law to the floor and wrench the weapon from her – only a few short minutes – and another two years before I would see my mother or sister again.
That fateful day, when I was taken to my grandmother’s house to live with my father, after that terrible turn of events, marked the last time I would see the inside of a school or the pages of a book for another 22-months. If I thought living in the topsy-turvy world of never-ending chaos created by my parents was bad, my new reality existing inside the “grey castle,” would morph into a daily struggle to survive my grandmother. It was during the next two years that I would retreat into a dark void, where I existed utterly alone in a world of my own imaginings. As my sixth birthday came and went, the solitary confinement that followed my almost daily beltings, smacks, and punishment for being a sinful “Christian Devil,” shifted from being locked in the guestroom to being thrown out of the house entirely, usually for four to five hours at a time, my grandmother letting me back in only thirty minutes before my father was due to arrive home from work. The humiliation of being left out in the street was worse than any physical beating – I hated being stared at by the neighbors, servants and tradesmen coming and going throughout the day who would stop, look, point and whisper at the girl who sat on the front doorstep for five straight hours, filling me with a rage that cut to my core. But, like everything in my life up to that point, I eventually adapted and made the best of my circumstances.
I learned to sit on various neighbors’ stoops, seeking the shadiest spots during the neighbors’ afternoon naps, when everyone sought respite from the scalding midday sun, so I wouldn’t get sunburned in the 100-degree heat that melted the bottom of my plastic slippers. Besides my perpetual hunger, the most challenging obstacle to being left in an alleyway for hours on end, was where to relive myself. Luckily, my grandmother’s house was situated at the end of the passageway and the long narrow jube, an outdoor sewer, running down the center of the lane ended a few feet from our front door, so whenever I had to urinate, I would try my best to hold it until noon when the neighbors enjoyed their midday meals, peeing into in the grate by stepping on either side of the ditch and squatting down, like a toilet, and using the ends of my dress to wipe myself.
After the first three months, when the residents of the alleyway got used to seeing me live half my life outdoors, they would often greet me as they may a familiar street dog. Some of the servants returning from the morning day’s shopping would chat with me, offering a piece of naan or rock candy. The farmer selling cucumbers every Tuesday would often bring me one or two from his cart, so whenever I saw him, I would run to greet him, the elderly man with the bushy white mustache getting a kick out of seeing how excited I would become whenever he allowed me to pet his donkey. The elderly ladies in the houses to the right and left of us would strike up conversations whenever they came out to dust their small rugs or sweep their front steps with the short scraggly brooms they used. If I was lucky, I would be given a cup of shaved melon with crushed ice, or a bowl of yogurt and mint after I carried their rugs back in for them.
I began to retreat deeper into the lonely world of my own new existence, my imagination becoming both my protection and my salvation once the beatings increased. I was too afraid to tell my father, knowing full well that I would only be left with my grandmother once Dad left in the mornings. The father I had known was lost in his sorrow and public dishonor, becoming more isolated and despondent as summer dissipated and the autumn leaves began blanketing the alleyway. Nevertheless, I clung to him the minute he walked through the door, just happy to have him near me.
It wasn’t until the following year that my father finally, and without warning, called my mother one day, and asked her to come and get me, after he noticed purple and black bruises across my lower back and shoulders when I changed my shirt one day after spilling soup during dinner. Mom was scheduled to arrive the next day by 5 pm, but that morning, Dad, though he couldn’t explain why, decided to leave work at 11:00 am. That was when my father ‘awoke’ from the stupor he had been in for two years. The rain came hard that morning and by the time Dad had reached the street leading to the narrow alleyway, he found himself traipsing through sheets of pouring rain, his pant legs soaked in the gush of water sweeping down the alley. To his consternation, as he turned the corner and looked up, he spotted the figure of his daughter outside, lying in the rain, balled up in a fetal position on top of the doormat, welts covering her legs and arms, shivering in the cold.
Two days later, my father moved out of his mother’s house and into his own apartment, my mom and dad beginning their new journey as single parents and finally, for the first time in their married lives, becoming friends.