Firoozeh Dumas Quote

Most immigrants agree that at some point, we become permanent foreigners, belonging neither here nor there. Many tomes have been written trying to describe this feeling of floating between worlds but never fully landing. Artists, using every known medium from words to film to Popsicle sticks, have attempted to encapsulate the struggle of trying to hang on to the solid ground of our mother culture and realizing that we are merely in a pond balancing on a lily pad with a big kid about to belly-flop right in. If and when we fall into this pond, will we be singularly American or will we hyphenate? Can we hold on to anything or does our past just end up at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be discovered by future generations?

Firoozeh Dumas

Most immigrants agree that at some point, we become permanent foreigners, belonging neither here nor there. Many tomes have been written trying to describe this feeling of floating between worlds but never fully landing. Artists, using every known medium from words to film to Popsicle sticks, have attempted to encapsulate the struggle of trying to hang on to the solid ground of our mother culture and realizing that we are merely in a pond balancing on a lily pad with a big kid about to belly-flop right in. If and when we fall into this pond, will we be singularly American or will we hyphenate? Can we hold on to anything or does our past just end up at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be discovered by future generations?

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About Firoozeh Dumas

Firoozeh Dumas (Persian: فیروزه دوما) (born June 26, 1965, in Abadan, Iran) is an Iranian-American writer who writes in English. She is the author of the memoirs Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America (2003) and Laughing without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen (2008), and the semi-autobiographical novel It Ain't so Awful, Falafel (2016).