Words to a Feeling: Notes on Sanaz Toossi
by Lizzie Stern
"I think I'm an expert in homesickness,” Sanaz Toossi revealed to me, when I sat down to interview her for this essay. What unfurled was a conversation — which you can read here — about female friendship, the failure of language, and proficiency in homesickness. “Detached homesickness,” she clarified. “For somewhere you didn’t grow up.”
Sanaz is a first-generation Iranian-American from Orange County, CA. From a young age, she has understood “the hyphen,” the in-between, the sense of belonging to two places – and, in a way, painfully, neither one. “We were the only ones here in our family,” she said, “and I was always told how lucky I was. But I always felt like when we went back to Iran — oh. They were the lucky ones.”
Sanaz's grief — the grief for somewhere you didn’t grow up — eludes language and, in turn, resolution. “I will never have all of the words for it,” she explained. “I’m on a quest.” And this makes sense. The feelings that haunt us the most are, after all, the ones we understand the least.
People have tried, in many languages, to describe this indescribable grief. In Welsh, there’s hiraeth, wistfulness for a home you can't return to, or may not have lived in. In German, there’sfernweh, homesickness for a place you’ve never been. Or in Portuguese, there’s saudade, aching nostalgia for an event that may not have happened to you.
And, in 1999, a similar term entered the English lexicon: ambiguous loss. “With ambiguous loss, there’s really no possibility of closure,” Pauline Boss, the psychologist who coined the term, explained on a 2016 episode of Krista Tippett’s podcast, "On Being" (the interview re-ran, in July 2020, for obvious reasons). Ambiguous loss, Boss goes on, “comes with things like immigration. Homesickness comes along with that. … It’s an illogical, chaotic, unbelievably painful situation that … people go through who have missing loved ones, either physically or psychologically.”
Wish You Were Here charts the evolving dynamics among a group of girlfriends in Karaj, Iran. Their relationships are a thick knot of love, vulnerability, ever-shifting alliances, menstruation anxiety, and pussy jokes. They unleash joy in the same breath as criticism, they are free from the judgment of men or parents, they are vulgar, they ask all their “stupid questions,” they are uninhibited and fully themselves. “I think with women, and I use that term broadly,” Sanaz told me, “my relationships tell me who I am. The best parts of me come forward, as do the worst parts. But they’re the parts that feel like me.”
The play also charts the progression of the Iranian Revolution, as some of the women decide to leave, and some decide to stay. Through it all, we observe the excruciating erosion of their friendships in the wake of displacement. And, as the women dissipate, the play’s lens begins to focus intimately on one who stays: Nazanin, who gradually becomes more alone and misanthropic. By the end, Nazanin confides: “Being your best friend was my whole personality.” For Nazanin, as for Sanaz, her girlfriends are the ones who bring out her most authentic self. So, when she loses those people — the ones who make her, well, her — how can she hold onto herself?
Sanaz's play, English, which she wrote while getting her MFA at New York University in 2018 — and which is playing through March 13 at Roundabout/Atlantic Theater Company in a production directed by Knud Adams — engages a similar question. It centers on a class in Iran, where students are learning English in preparation for the TOEFL. “It’s about language and how hard it is to leave,” Sanaz said, “and what it means to let that part of yourself go.” In the same way, when Nazanin lets her friends go, she lets herself go, too.
These are unresolvable losses, better felt than explained. Even the phrase “ambiguous loss” is an imperfect descriptor. But Sanaz embraces the indescribable. I think of her as a geologist of grief: she studies the collateral damage of absence — of death, of immigration — through the patterns of erosion — of friendships, of self — which fossilize in its wake.
That is what makes Sanaz’s stories perfect for the theater. “If you’re able to fully capture what your play is about in words, maybe it shouldn’t be a play,” Sanaz stated simply. “I’m learning it’s more questions not answers, which also makes me feel deeply exposed.”
The most indelible plays are the ones that are exposing. They are nakedly themselves, they have nothing to prove. They don’t provide answers but, rather, work through existential questions — holding the sublime with the profane, and the beautiful with all the ugly, messy emotions that render human life recognizable and true.
It is an act of courage to work from this place: as the writer, you are not explaining yourself, or proving how smart you are. You are revealing the deepest parts of yourself. You are engaging in an intimate exchange with the audience – treating them not as a spectator, but as a friend. And there is, in this theater, a kind of salve for ambiguous loss. “In first generation kids like me,” Sanaz said, “I’ve found a real home."
