scheherazade through the looking glass: my sister’s phoenix plant

by Parisa Aryán

My sister owns a plant that she keeps in our living room, right next to the TV. Don’t ask me what kind of plant it is; I have no idea. All I know is that it has huge green leaves and no flowers.

The thing about this plant is, in the two years that my sister has had it, it has died about a hundred times. I’m serious. We will wake up one day, go into the living room and find that the leaves are going brown and the plant in general looks like it will most definitely not last until the end of the week. We will go to bed that night assuming that we will soon have to throw the poor thing away, and then we will wake up again the next day to find that, out of nowhere, the plant has a new baby leaf that is the greenest of greens. And thus its cycle will begin again and it will live for another few months until one day we will wake up to see brown leaves again. And so it goes.

Because I don’t know what kind of plant it is, and because it has this freakish habit of rising again after we think it’s gone forever, I call it “the phoenix plant,” after the mythological bird that bursts into flames to reappear from its own ashes as a new baby bird to begin the cycle again.

I have always been mesmerized by the phoenix. There is something incredibly empowering about this mythological creature that rises again and again after its own death. When I was in high school, I started facing various different problems in my life, problems that suddenly became real as opposed to the somehow imaginary childhood troubles that came and went from one second to the next. In those times of trouble, it helped me tremendously to think of myself as a mythological phoenix that was capable of rising from its own ashes and rebuilding its life. To this day, I still picture myself as that bird when I have a problem or when I’m feeling down.

Actually, the process of being reborn from one’s life’s ashes is something that we all have to go through quite regularly. In general, I don’t think that we are particularly conscious of just how unpredictable our lives are; but in fact, they are so unpredictable that we never know when we are going to have to gather all our strength, put on a crash-helmet, buckle up and start all over again. Not everyone feels capable of doing this, but I’ve always thought that we can all do it — you just need to have a little bit of faith in your own strength. I know, it’s easier said than done; but believe me, it’s possible.

As an actress, I experiment with rebirths all the time. One of the most amazing things about my craft is that you can be reborn as thousands of different people in one lifetime. Not that this is always such an appealing thought: I have often wondered what makes me want to dedicate my whole life to being other people. What do I find in this that makes it so attractive?

At the moment, I am acting in a play about immigration in Spain. It is based on a series of real interviews with immigrants from different parts of the world who have somehow ended up in Spain, rebuilding their lives from the ashes left behind in their beaten homelands. Being a daughter to immigrants and never having shaken that condition (even though I was very young when we left Iran), the play is pushing emotional buttons that have never been pushed before. There was a time, at the beginning of the rehearsal process, when I thought that I wouldn’t be able to be a part of the project — that I would be crying non-stop throughout the rehearsals and shows and wouldn’t be able to tell these people’s stories with the dignity and strength that they deserve. However, the truth is that in theatre, as in life, sometimes you need to hit rock bottom with your emotions in order to rise again.

So maybe the phoenix isn’t such an unreal creature after all. I think that we’ve all been phoenixes at some point or another in our lives. It is this capability to build a new, better self out of the ashes of our previous ones that makes us who we are and leads us through our lives towards what we will become. And maybe this is one of the things that I find so attractive about acting: with every new character, I become a better person.

By the way, last week my sister and I woke up to find that the phoenix plant had grown a flower.

tagged under:europe, living abroad, spain