A Q&A with Sanaz Toossi
On January 24, Literary Director Lizzie Stern interviewed Sanaz Toossi at Sanaz’s apartment in Brooklyn. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation. It’s worth knowing that Lizzie and Sanaz are good friends, so there’s a bit of over-sharing here (in parentheses) — which, for a play about female friendship, seemed only fitting.
Lizzie began by reading an excerpt from a 2016 interview with psychologist Pauline Boss, on Krista Tippett’s podcast “On Being.”
Lizzie Stern (quoting Boss): “Homesickness was an essential part of my family’s culture… I think it may be true for all immigrant families, but it certainly was for mine. And it was even in the village because there were many immigrant families there. So it became a sort of pathos that would be in the family when we weren’t even aware of it, except that I could see the sadness periodically, like when my father would get a letter from Switzerland, or worse yet, a letter with a black rim around it, which meant announcement of death in the family. So I was always aware that there was another family somewhere and that there was some homesickness. Except, where was home? I figured that home was in Wisconsin where we lived. Yet I knew he had this other family across the Atlantic that he pined for. My maternal grandmother was the same. Of course, she refused to learn English. She said she lost her mountains, she lost her mother, she lost her friends, and she wasn’t going to lose her language.”
Sanaz Toossi: That is crazy beautiful.
LS: There’s a way in which, with this type of loss, and with any traumatic thing, people turn it in toward themselves and blame themselves. It’s especially true with ambiguous loss because you can’t point to a concrete fixed point in the swirling chaos of the lack of justice in the world, which feels so much like the moment we’re going through. But, really? This loss feels, to me, a part of your play. (Oh my God, it makes me want to cry.)
ST: (Me too, I’m on the verge of tears.) I’ve been looking for that term for a really long time because I think it defines all of my work. Homesickness. It’s hard to describe it when it was just the way I grew up. You know, we were the only ones here in our family. I’ve always been balancing the privilege in being an American. There were opportunities that were available to me that were maybe not available to my family members 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. We grew up naturally with a separation. All of us. We know what family separation means from the day we are born. And Iranians are so resilient. Our culture lifts up celebration and joy, and our parties are obnoxiously beautiful and egregious. We are a people who know how to celebrate. But even in our celebration, in our extravagant weddings, I am always so cognizant of what it means to celebrate when not everyone is there. I’ve never had a second where I didn’t know that. Everything I write has to do with that kind of ambiguous loss. In [my play] English, it’s about language and how hard it is to leave, and what it means to let that part of yourself go. Wish You Were Here is about friendship and what happens when people you love leave, and what that means about your connection to where you’re from. The loss of a friend can feel like the death of a friend… I always wonder if I will ever stop writing about this. I don’t know.
LS: In a way, it’s a more complicated grief if a person is still alive but not there. And when it’s a person who is such a part of you. Because something about homesickness, too, is that, yes, it’s about home but it’s also that idea, [quoting a line in the play]: being your best friend was my whole personality. You know? It’s when a person is home… and how alienated you become from yourself, and how hard it is to be at home in yourself, too, without them.
ST: I think with women, and I use that term broadly — for me, my relationships with women tell me who I am. In ways that I don’t necessarily get in other parts of my life. And the best parts of me come forward, as do the worst parts. But they’re the parts that feel like me.
LS: Which parts?
ST: That I can be mean. It doesn’t make me feel good to be mean to people, but I like that that part of me exists. That I’m not a pushover.
LS: Yeah, you don’t suffer fools. I’ve never seen you be mean in my life, but I also know that you stand up for yourself when you need to.
ST: Thank you. I hope so. I really have liked that about growing up: that mean girl’s not going anywhere, I enjoy her presence in my life.
LS: I want to go back to something you said before. Of knowing and feeling the presence of the absence of people. What do you feel it gives you to write about this? I mean emotionally. How does writing about them, about homesickness, make you feel?
ST: That’s a really good question. You know, as I’m in the very nascent stages of planning my own wedding –
LS: (Oh my GOD so much to talk about. I haven’t even seen the ring.)
ST: (I know, I got it re-sized.) Anyway. Writing doesn’t make me feel better. What would make me feel better would be if I could have all of my family at my wedding. That would make me feel better. But instead I’m going to have to have a million weddings so that I can celebrate with everyone I love. And that… has been a really hard reality to face. I think a lot of the reason why I write is that so much of this is hard to talk about. I think it’s the only thing that I’m actually able to write about. Because it’s the only thing that keeps my interest. You know, writing takes time. You have a sexy idea one minute and the next, it’s the most embarrassing thing. You’d die if anyone knew what you thought was your cool hot sexy idea.
LS: Totally.
ST: So [homesickness] is the thing that I will always write about because I will never have all of the words for it. I think I’m on a quest for all of the words. I think when I write, I want to be understood by immigrant kids like me. With them, I know I am telling the truth. Even if it only makes sense to us. That’s what I try to remember. I get really in my head about reviews and it’s devastating to feel like you’re not understood by people. Playwrights don’t talk about it but we also need validation.
LS: Oh my God.
ST: I’m a colossal pain in the ass. As are most playwrights I know. But I’ve found a real home in first-generation kids like me who validate the hours and make me trust myself.
LS: Do you know Sheila Heti, the writer? She’s a beautiful fiction/non-fiction writer and I just took a class with her called “What do people see when they read you?” The premise of the course, which is implied in the title, is how vulnerable writing is — how much of yourself is in the work that you’re sharing. And we’re not worried about how people are going to respond to our artistry and how they’ll see our craft and structure, sure, we want to make something that’s beautiful. But I think really the thing we’re all preoccupied with is how that opinion bears on how they see me, what they think of me. And this is an often unspoken part of writing: it is an act of self-expression. And any self-expression is inherently going to be, in some way, a failure because language can’t do everything we want it to do.
ST: I love that about plays. If you’re able to fully capture what your play is about in words, maybe it shouldn’t be a play. I love that language fails us. It should.
LS: It should. And I do think that that is also something you write about, the failure of language.
ST: I’ve tried to learn to be comfortable with the inability to fully encapsulate something and to be comfortable with the mystery and that I will never be able to fully describe it – that it is contradictory. And I feel both lucky and unlucky at the same time. I’m learning [that the project of playwriting is more about] questions not answers, which also makes me feel deeply exposed. Because, just to state it baldly, I’m worried people will think I’m stupid. And I don’t know a playwright who doesn’t worry about that. But I would like not to let that fear rule my writing, or especially re-writing.
LS: Any fear can be something that works for you or against you. It can either motivate you to keep going or be debilitating. And I do think there’s a point at which, in a process, you reach a moment of acceptance. It’s hard to say if a play can ever be finished because the process by which that text becomes fixed is so fluid and has everything to do with your collaborators and your audiences. Which is a scary thing. Because a lot of that you can’t control. It’s not like writing a novel. A play morphs in real time in response to its reception. When a play is being performed, it’s responding to its actors and to its reader: the audience. And if you’re the playwright, and you’re sitting there hearing it, you have to decide: do I want to make a change to the text because of this actor, or this audience — or not?
ST: Right.
LS: Now, I want to go back to a basic thing that I took for granted in starting this conversation. Which is the question that Brené Brown (who you introduced me to, thank you) starts her interviews with. The question: tell me your story.
ST: I am a first generation Iranian-American girl from Orange County, and I love "The Real Housewives of Potomac."
LS: Oh my God yes.
ST: I really never saw myself as a playwright. I had no idea that this is what my life would be.
LS: Well. It’s interesting. Because—
ST: (Your eyebrows look amazing.)
LS: (Stop, I’ve been thinking that about you this entire time.)
ST: (They’re my dream eyebrows.)
LS: (Honestly I’m so glad you said that, I can’t even tell you what I’ve been going through with my skin this week, it’s been so horrible.)
ST: (When I rub castor oil into my eyebrows at night, risking my eyesight, I do it for your eyebrows.)
LS: (I don’t even get it because your eyebrows are aspirational for me.) Anyway, going back to this fear writers have of being seen as “stupid,” or wanting to be seen as “smart.” Here’s a stupid question: what does “smart” mean?
ST: I used to think it meant being in command of language. That’s when I wrote English. I am in command of language — but not reliably. But I don’t know if anyone is reliably. Unless you’re Barack Obama. The playwrights I love the most are okay with mystery. A monologue’s not gonna do it. Still won’t be enough. But what is “stupid,” what is “smart”? I wonder if it’s more about curiosity. Like how trendsetters are smart because they do the new thing when it’s super effing ugly.
LS: I also think being smart has to do, in part, with knowing yourself. It’s about being an expert. What are you an expert in? I could tell you what I think you’re an expert in. But I want to hear what you think you’re an expert in.
ST: I understand, in my bones, how cruel people can be when they’re trying to be kind to each other. I really love and feel at home in that. I know how to write that scene. I think I’m an expert in homesickness. Detached homesickness — for somewhere you didn’t grow up. I understand friendship deeply. And I understand absences. Really I do. And I’m an expert in riding the hyphen. The gap. The in-between. Feeling like half. I think all of these are just other words for homesickness.
LS: I would add to that: your writing is so funny. I mean, I don’t want us to get too dark here. I also think you’re an expert in loneliness, feeling alone with other people.
ST: That may actually be the definition of homesickness. Or at least when I think about Iranians — especially Southern California Iranians — it’s like we have found our people. We have a community. And I almost feel it’s controversial to say it will still never be enough.
LS: Because there’s no closure.
ST: Right, it has nothing to do with anyone. It’s not about intention or action.
LS: It’s the situation.
ST: Right, it’s fact.
LS: Pauline Boss also says this about “complicated grief,” which is what results from ambiguous loss: “it's not pathological psyche — it’s a pathological situation, the situation is crazy, illogical, chaotic, unbelievably painful, chronic grief, an incremental death.”
ST: And it’s so complicated with Iranians because I’m not sure we fully understand what seeing ourselves as model minorities has done to us. That’s hard to talk about. When you talk about the model minority myth with minorities, you’re met with a lot of push-back. Because what they hear is your hard work meant nothing. But I’m not saying that. My parents are so hard-working. We can be successful and trauma can still exist. We don’t want to look back at the pain. Because if we look back at the pain, it’s like saying we didn’t create something beautiful for ourselves. And I think we can do both.
LS: I’ve been doing Torah study classes lately, and there was just this interesting conversation over the weekend about an image of a forest that had been destroyed, and from the stumps grew seedlings. And from those seedlings grew saplings. It’s a disgusting image of decapitated trees disturbingly growing saplings from their stumps. But there is such beauty in this image, this image of rebirth from terrible loss. And I think about who you said you’re writing your plays for: first generation kids. I think about generations, and trauma, and what’s unspeakable. And what the next generation, the people you’re writing towards, you as the artist who can find words for it, and the gift of that. And how painful, too. How painful it is to feel like it can never be enough. But still it must be.
ST: The mistake is always feeling like you have to put a value on it. That’s the mistake. Thinking I’m lucky, or no it’s hard - I’m really comfortable now with that it’s both. And sometimes that means you start a sentence saying one thing and end contradicting yourself.
LS: That’s what makes your characters so beautiful. They are filled with self-contradiction.
ST: What do you like about plays?
LS: Humor, deep insight, a shift in perspective, nuanced characters who surprise me in the ways they contradict themselves, and a sense of self-expression on the page that feels authentic and not forced.
ST: I agree with all of that. Humor especially feels so truthful for me. It’s unavoidable. Especially with the Middle East. I feel like it’s a quiet rebellion to have our plays be funny. And when you feel a deep quest for a truth in the play. I love plays that think through a question. I don’t necessarily think my plays do that, but I really treasure that. I love anything that’s a little bit ugly. I am so grateful for plays that you watch and you look over at the playwright and they look embarrassed because they’ve told on themselves. They said something they weren’t supposed to say. I admire that.
LS: Vulnerability.
ST: Our work should be a little bit embarrassing.
LS: Of course. It’s so so embarrassing.
ST: It’s like getting pantsed in public. Here I am, here are my granny panties bunched up in my butt cheeks.
LS: And I have my period and haven’t gotten waxed in a really long time.
ST: Yep, don’t know what you’re looking at but it’s not good.
LS: Right I haven’t even looked down there because I don’t want to see.
ST: Yes it’s important to forget that I have a body.
LS: (I can’t imagine a scenario in which I don’t want to know every single thing you think about something I’m dealing with.)
ST: (Me too. You’re the reason I got into "The Real Housewives of Potomac.")
