Books for the Dub

I love listening to an audiobook while I'm cooking, and this evening, it was The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali, a story spanning decades from the 1950s to the 1980s and crossing oceans from Iran to New York City. The novel was well recommended, but I think I chose it in part because last year, I listened to Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. I was profoundly moved by that story of a young man who had moved with his dad to the States from Iran after his mother was lost when her plane was shot down by the USS Vincennes. 

When I was in high school in Switzerland in the late 1970s, several Iranian students were attending the school, too. Scions of wealthy families connected to the Shah, most were enrolled at our American school to learn English abroad, but not so far away as the United States. Those kids were a cultural force, and knowing them, living in the Middle East myself, and following the political upheaval of 1979 and beyond is definitely a draw for me when it comes to an Iranian setting.

In high school, we all learned Persian cussing. To this day, I could call bullshit or tell someone to go fuck their mom in Farsi, a skill I'm marginally proud of. At any rate, tonight, the main character in the novel describes her love of learning geography, and one of the examples is Portugal. "In our language the country is called Burtuqal," she says, "which means orange."

I've been to Portugal, and I know that vocabulary; the word for orange is the same in Arabic, which I learned in school in Saudi Arabia. But I never made the connection. How can it be that Portugal is named after oranges, or oranges after Portugal, and I never knew it? 

But how glad I am that I know it now!