THE DISPLACED
REFUGEE WRITERS ON REFUGEE LIVES
EDITED BY
VIET THANH NGUYEN
PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR OF
THE SYMPATHIZER
23
Last, First, Middle
JOSEPH AZAM
M
ost days I hide in plain sight. I am a Muslim refugee from a war-torn country—the sum of many fears— camouflaged by the trappings of Anglo-American-ness: fair skin, a mastery of the American vernacular, a picture of my blue-eyed wife and daughter on my desk at work, and called by a name that my late grandfather would not recognize. I am an Afghan-American. My parents, Ashraf and Nina, like many Afghans in the late 1970s and early 1980s, fled from Afghanistan as the country became a frontline in the Cold War. In 1980, they made it as far as Virginia, where some of their friends, also émigrés from Afghanistan, had settled. Tey set about to build a life there, but they were interrupted when my grandfather Haji Mohammad Azam— my father’s father— fell ill back in Kabul with a failing heart. In 1981, not knowing the extent of my grandfather’s illness, my parents returned to Afghanistan to be at his side. My mother was four months preg-nant with me at the time. Choosing to go back into a war zone with no guarantee of a second escape spoke volumes about how precious my grandfa-ther was in our family and my parents’ dedication to him. Tat, combined with the strong pull of their ancestral soil, made a decision that many would have considered difficult an easy one for them.
THE DISPLACED
24
One o the deep pains in my lie is that I never got to know my grandather, my
baba jaan
; I have only a handul o photos and not a single memory o him. He knew me though. Trough-out my childhood my parents would requently remind me o his strong attachment to me. Family lore is that my mother’s pregnancy is what kept him alive. His longing to meet me, they say, willed his deteriorating body to carry on through the late stages o heart ailure. Afer I was born, his love or me and my parents’ sense o our fleeting time together in Kabul led them to ask him to choose my name. My baba jaan was a man o deep aith so having received this task rom my parents that was the first place he turned. Te story, as it’s been recounted to me over the years, is that he sat down with his well-worn Quran and asked God to guide his hands as he opened it to a random page, a page that turned out to be the beginning o the
Surah Yousuf
, the narrative o the prophet Yousu. Known or its lessons in righteousness, cour-age, patience, and orgiveness, the twelfh
surah
o the Quran is regarded by Muslims as one o its most beautiul and lucid. For my grandather, this was a revelation. He named me Mohammad Yousu Azam. Tese names— his first and most generous gifs to me— were weighty, mean-ingul, and, I’ve always assumed, a mark o his aspirations or me. Te name Mohammad I shared with my two grandathers and my ather, who, like millions o other Muslims, carried it in the hope o being able to ollow a path as virtuous as Prophet Mohammad. My name was a product o my grandather’s hopes and conviction; it was my inheritance. In the months afer I was born, Aghanistan ell deeper into turmoil. Tese were the early days o the Soviet occupation, a