Robin Dluzen
Maggy Hiltner
Elina Ansary

Time Traveler - Elina Ansary

Sheltering in place got me thinking about wandering, and what it means to wander. And how I feel great distances internalized, how my body is a gulf that spans continents.

It started with the sudden death of a close friend. On a January night, in an ICU in Brooklyn, hooked to a ventilator: he died as the clock struck midnight, he died like an omen. I was supposed to go to Europe in March. It was already a dream deferred. Another, stranger, calamity of the pervious year had thrown my plans into limbo. So I was supposed to make up for it in March of 2020. Well, nothing ever goes as planned. Not this year.

So then I was grounded, the whole world was grounded. I felt like a caged animal, full of yearning for strange places. Why was travel—movement—inside of me? Instinctual, like an inherited trait. Well that’s true, really. My mother’s side is all Ashkenazi Jews, who never belonged to the countries where they lived, only to themselves and their diaspora. My great-grandmother came to New York—where I live now—alone from Lithuania when she was 17. And then there’s my dad’s side.

When I tell people I’m Jewish and Afghan (like its a secret to spill), they always say “Oh how interesting!” And then I don’t know what to say. My parents met as hippies in San Francisco. People think of Muslims and Jews as opposing forces, but in the landscape where my parents met, they were of the same tribe. I grew up in a secular Edwardian house on a hill, celebrating Hanukkah, and Christmas, eating Afghan rice at dinner parties, talking to boys on AIM. I’m not a real Afghan or a real Jew. And yet, I dreamed about this magic land that I belonged to. Like Narnia, Afghanistan felt enchanted, real but another realm. It felt like my father—with his stories about playing in ancient desert palaces as a child—was some kind of deposed prince, and I was somehow heir.

My grandmother was American. When she arrived in Afghanistan with my Afghan grandfather in 1945, a 24-year- old newlywed, she was the only American woman in the whole country. These stories become myths upon which I’ve built my world. She’s been dead now for 14 years, her mind and memory lost almost a decade earlier to Altzeimer’s. In the pandemic spring, my father sent me a word document of her memoirs.

She wrote of my Afghan Great-Grandmother: “Had she been hostile or critical my life would have been much more difficult, for others would have followed suit. K'ko would refer to me from time to time as a musafer, a traveler, a term in the Moslem world for one who is living under difficult circumstances away from home. As she used it, it implied that one has been taken from one's family and familiar surroundings, is existing without emotional support and therefore needs extra consideration. Since she had been married off from a distant village to Mir's father as little more than a child and had never had contact with any of her family since, she probably identified with me to a degree.”

Musafer. مسافر . The word stuck in my mind. The way it’s written in Arabic script, the beauty of the calligraphy that I can’t read, and how the word feels written in my blood and on my bones. I’m a born مسافر ,like all the grandmothers and great-grandmothers before me. In that way, I suppose, Afghanistan is inside me, while still I am a stranger to it.