(In Part 1 of this series, Pauline Yeghnazar Peck spoke about how therapy helped her cope with her mother’s death as well as lead her into a career as a licensed psychologist helping adult children of immigrants. In Part 2, she talked about being a “social translator” for her parents. In this final part, she discusses the languages she spoke at home, as well as the surprise people express when they find out she’s not Muslim.)
When Pauline Yeghnazar Peck was growing up in both Iran and the United States, the language spoken at home would switch from Farsi to English to Armenian, depending on the context of the conversation.
Her parents were the pastors of a Farsi-speaking church, “but English was that common language if you didn’t speak Farsi,” particularly when people were over or there were Bible studies at her house.
With her immediate family, like grandparents, they spoke Armenian.
“Armenian was like our family language,” Yeghnazar Peck says. “Farsi and Persian was like our work language and when you’re the pastor’s kid, work and life are intertwined.”
While she doesn’t remember it, “everyone says that I spoke what they call like a ‘bolbul,’ which is like a sweet way of liberal translation as a nightingale, but it’s it’s like a beautiful term of endearment for a young kid that’s speaking well in a certain language. So I spoke it very well, but then I forgot it because when I moved to America, I learned English and the Farsi went away.”
The Farsi came back though, especially in Junior High School, where she had access to girlfriends that spoke Farsi, that wound up being their “cool secret language.”
“And that motivated me,” she adds. “I still speak Armenian, Farsi/Persian and obviously English. So those are still the three languages that are in my arsenal.”
I really see myself as Iranian Armenian.
ASSUMING SHE’S A MUSLIM
For Yeghnazar Peck, a lot of times people are surprised that she is Christian.
“They’re surprised that I identify as Iranian, because Iran is my nationality,” she says. “Armenian is my ethnic heritage. And I claim the Iranianness, I really see myself as Iranian Armenian. I cannot separate those two, because … I get to define my identity.”
Her family had been in Iran “for generations. It was a country that I had generational roots in, that shaped me in innumerable ways whose language and customs are so infused with my Armenianness that I can’t think of an Armenianess that is mine that is outside of being Iranian, Armenian, from the cuisine to the dialect, to even the current events that mattered to my family.”
Sometimes Yeghnazar Peck would have people tell her she’s “not Iranian, you’re Armenian,” to which she’d respond: “You don’t get to tell me who I am. No, I’m Iranian. Even other Iranians will say, ‘No, but you’re Armenian, because ethnically, you’re not Persian, right?’ And no, that matters for me. It matters. That hyphenation for me is part of really claiming the things that have shaped me in the things that have impacted me and the things that matter to me most.”
When she looks at old family photos, Yeghnazar Peck sees her parents having “very liberal” experiences with Jews, Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians and even Baha’is.
“It was with this Islamic regime and this erasure of those differences, where now I think people equate, OK, Iran and Muslim, but I don’t even think that’s how people in the country identify,” she says. “So a lot of these things are just based on stereotypes as well.”
