Pardis Mahdavi with Rich Smith: A Social and Personal History of the Hyphen

Good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Weyer Harmon. I'm the executive director of Town Hall Seattle. On behalf of our team and our partner bookseller tonight at Third Place Books, it's a pleasure to welcome you to tonight's livestream presentation of Pardis Mahdavi in conversation with Rich Smith as part of our Arts and Culture series. As we get underway, I want to acknowledge that our institution stands on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish people, and particularly the Duwamish. We thank them for our continuing use of the natural resources of their ancestral homeland. And we thank you all for joining us here on our newish streaming platform, myths.org. Like everything at Town Hall, it is a work in progress. We added some new functions just this week, so please don't hesitate to tell us about your experience. We know you won't, at the address that you see in the chat below the video pane. Tonight's conversation will run 50 to 60 minutes, including a Q&A with our audience. Questions will be submitted from those in the chat field at the bottom of the video player. Please submit yours at any time. You can also text your questions At 206-504-2857. You'll find that number below too. You don't have to remember it. We can't guarantee we'll be able to address everyone, but we'll try to get to as many as possible. And for those of you who want to view the program with closed captions, click the CC button in the bottom right corner of the video player. Town Hall is adding new podcasts and events every day. Upcoming programs include Donna Miskolcza joining us with an assembled panel of writers discussing the ways that mixed-race identity informs their work. Arjun Singh Sethi and Navjot Gill describing the urgent fight against industrial agriculture in India. And our friends at the Institute for Systems Biology will present Dr. Temple Grandin for a delightful exploration of the world around us and how we can all be amateur scientists. We've got a handful— unless you're already a professional scientist, in which case you can learn other things from Dr. Grandin. We've got a small handful of events featuring live audiences coming in June too. I didn't read that right. We've got a small handful of events actually featuring live audiences coming in June as well, so keep your eyes peeled for information about that at townhallseattle.org. Town Hall's work is made possible through your support and the support of our sponsors. Our arts and culture programming is supported by 4Culture, ArtsFund, Seattle's Office of Arts and Culture, the Norcliffe Foundation, and the Windcoast Foundation Northwest. But as you likely know, Town Hall is underneath it all a member-supported organization, and I want to thank all of our members watching this evening. One last note, You'll want to dive deeper into tonight's discussion, or topic I should say, by purchasing a copy of the book Dr. Mahdavi is discussing. So please use the link in the chat below to buy through our partner bookseller Third Place Books rather than at, you know, some other monolithic online purveyor of other stuff as well as books. All right, having a tough time tonight, but I'm going to rebound. Watch me work. Pardis Mahdavi is Dean of Social Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. While you could say her chief area of expertise is the Middle East, Dr. Mahdavi's research covers labor, migration, gender, sexuality, human rights, youth culture, transnational feminism, and public health. Before her career in the academy, she was a journalist writing for Ms. Magazine, Foreign Affairs, the Huffington Post, and other publications. She's also the author of 5 books, including a first book on the sexual politics of modern Iran. Passionate Uprisings Around Sexual Revolution, which came out back in 2008. And that book was the occasion of her first visit to Town Hall, by the way, we just realized. She's been a fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Google Ideas. And her work has been covered in documentaries, radio shows, podcasts, media outlets, including CNN, PBS, NPR, and Publishers Weekly. Rich Smith is the associate editor of The Stranger, where he covers politics and books. He's also a poet. Author of the collection All Talk, published in 2014, as well as a chapbook from 2013, Great Poem of Desire and Other Poems. His work has appeared in Tin House, Guernica, Barrow Street, Pinwheel, among others. Mahdavi's book— new book, Hyphen, is the subject of this evening's discussion. Please join me in welcoming Rich Smith and Pardis Mahdavi.

Thanks. Thanks, Ware. Welcome, Pardis.

Thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks, Ware. Thanks to Seattle Town Hall for having me back. Um, what a great honor it is to be back after, uh, having the opportunity to be in conversation with you all after my first book, uh, Fashion Uprisings. It was great to be back.

Yes, well, welcome. Well, talking about your 400th book, I think, after hearing the, uh, that incredible introduction that Ware gave— hyphen. Um, let's just start at the start. You dedicate your book to your son Shayan for, quote, asking the question. What did he ask?

So a little bit of background. My son Shayan is, I think, kind of a living embodiment of the hyphen in many ways. So he is— I'm Iranian American. His father is Chinese American. So he's double hyphenated, if you will. And if that weren't enough, he's got a hyphenated last name. So he's got Mahdavi hyphen Kung. So he's hyphenated in every way you can be hyphenated.

Like kaleidoscopic. the—

Exactly, like 3D hyphen, right? But, you know, he asked me a question about, you know, what that hyphen, what that little tiny marker was. Well, he said, what is this about? And he said, you know, and at one point I was looking up different kinds of hyphens, and he said, well, is my hyphen a non-breaking hyphen? And I, you know, I kind of was like, you know, this is— and he's 8, he's 8 years old, he was 7 at the time when he was asking it. question. And I thought, you know, he's on to something here. And, and so I became really inspired to track the journey of the hyphen as an orthographic concept, and was incredibly inspired to see that the journey of the hyphen mirrors the journey of hyphenated Americans and hyphenated people around the world. So I owe it all to my 8-year-old son.

Well, thank you, 8-year-old son. Ended up, yeah, yielding a very, uh, a good and, and fascinating book, um, part of which is rooted in your own experience of wrestling with, uh, your relationship with that hyphen, uh, and I'd like to, uh, quote you, if you don't mind. Uh, again, you say that, uh, it, it took getting arrested and kicked out of Iran to wrap my limbs around the hyphen, but once I did, I found the power inside. Um, could you tell the story of getting kicked out of Iran and doing so, uh, explain—

And why was I there and all of that?

What were you doing there? Uh, and yeah, and, uh, and then also in doing so, could you explain what stopped you from accessing the power in that hyphen beforehand?

Yeah, and actually, that, that last part of your question is kind of what inspired me to go to Iran to begin with. So, um, I was born in a hyphenated city, Minneapolis-St. Paul, uh, and, um, I was born the year of the Iranian Revolution. My mom was 8 months pregnant with me when she and my dad left Iran.

Wow.

Um, and so I was born into a hyphenated identity, I guess you could say. And growing up in the United States, I always felt like I didn't fit in, I didn't belong. And Minneapolis-St. Paul wasn't the diverse place that it is today. And so in a sense, the journey of that city mirrors the journey of hyphenated America, which I think is interesting. But I was always too Iranian in the US. I'd go to school and open my lunchbox and this aromatic Persian food would come out. And I looked different from my classmates. And so growing up, I always had trouble fitting in. And, you know, I never felt like I belonged. So I, you know, always thought that, well, if I could just get to Iran, if I could just go to Iran, then I'll fit in there. I'll feel belonging there because I certainly don't feel like I fit here. And so growing up, I felt this sort of like liminality, right? Neither here nor there, that betwixt and between that so many, you know, children of immigrants face, right? And so then, you know, I was a journalist. I was doing stories for the LA Times Magazine, and then I was getting ready to go to graduate school. And so I managed to convince some folks to let me go to Iran to cover the women's movement and got inspired to write about the sexual revolution, which became the topic of my first book. But I think one of the hardest things for me was when I got to Iran, I didn't fit there either. I was too American in Iran. Right? So my, my headscarf was constantly slipping. It turned out my Persian, which I thought was really beautiful, was heavily accented. And I just— I like— I stuck out like a sore thumb in Iran. And so I felt that I didn't belong there either. And so that was really hard for me because, you know, I was too Iranian in America, too American in Iran. And so it was this sense of, I don't fit here, I don't fit there. But I kept, I kept trying to sort of make myself fit in Iran after, you know, 20 years in the United States of feeling like I didn't belong. I kept saying, well, okay, this is, you know, I went there initially to write stories, you know, as a journalist, and then I ended up doing my PhD dissertation on the sexual revolution in Iran. And, you know, so I became an anthropologist, and that was my field site. And I, you know, gosh darn it, I was going to make belonging there. And then, you know, wrote a book about sex in Iran. Probably wasn't, you know, the best idea if I wanted to stay there.

Didn't fit in, at least with the people, people in charge at the time.

Right, exactly, exactly. And so, you know, after that book, I was promptly kicked out and stripped of my citizenship. And so Then, you know, there I was, an anthropologist without a field site, an Iranian American who couldn't go back to Iran. And, you know, I'm like, whoa, what's going on? You know, where do I belong? Where do I fit? Mm-hmm. And, you know, in kind of coming back and really, you know, understanding, okay, you know, that I didn't actually fit there. I then started meeting a lot of other hyphenated people like myself. I was living in New York City, lots of hyphenated people in New York City. And I realized that a lot of our journeys were similar. And so I realized that I didn't have to pick one side or the other of the hyphen, but that I could live in the in-between, and that there's power, that that's not an empty space, that that's not a compromise, but that there's a power In living in the hyphen.

Wow. Yeah, that's, uh, um, uh, quite the journey. You, you skipped over the, the kicking out, uh, part, or you, you want to go quickly, uh, past the kicking out part. And it's, uh, you, you go in detail, uh, in the book, and I encourage everyone, uh, to buy the book. Um, uh, it's certainly worth, uh, your time and attention. But how— I just had some, some— how long were you in Could you just kind of tell a part of that story? Don't give everything away.

I can't give away too much, Rich, because I'm writing a memoir at the moment, which actually goes really deep into detail about that. So,

okay, well, just give a sense of scale. How long were you not able to leave an apartment building?

Right, yeah. So how long was I, you know, 33 days.

That's too long. I think

a long time, although, right, it's a long time. Although I, I still consider myself lucky, you know, because I had so many, you know, friends who— I, I have friends who are still in jail and, and who are in Evin Prison in Iran. And so I, you know, I think that every time I sort of start to go down a rabbit hole, I think I, I'm— I actually was one of the lucky ones. And people ask me, you know, if you— if someone had told you that that was going to happen to you, would you have not written that book? And I wouldn't. I stand by that book. I think that book is really— it was an important story to tell. And it was a story that nobody was telling, that young people were engaged in a sexual revolution, which, you know, at the end of that book, I predicted that it was going to lead to kind of a civil rights type movement, which it did exactly 12 months later in the Green Movement. Mm-hmm. And so I do stand by the book. It was a very high price. I paid a very high price for that book, but I do stand by the book. And I do think that those 33 days and actually being stripped of my citizenship, I actually think that that taught me about belonging in a way that I maybe wouldn't have. You know, I don't know that this book would exist if that hadn't happened.

Do you get— I'm not quite sure how to phrase this. But well, first of all, do you still talk to— or how do you— how often do you talk to people who are still there, your friends?

Oh, every week. Yeah. Yeah. My family is there. Yeah, my dad's family is all there. My cousins, and then a lot of my, you know, friends. I spent You know, basically from 2000 to 2007 or '08, you know, there more than I was here, and made really deep lasting bonds. And so, of course, I'm still close with folks there.

Yeah. So the government could take away your citizenship but not your whatever Iran—

Not your home.

Yeah.

Right? Like, they can take away— they can take everything from you. They can take your house. and they could take your citizenship, but they can't take your home. They can't take your heart. They can't take that Iranian-Americanness. Like, I, I still get to be Iranian-American. I still get to be that person. I still get to pass my culture down to my children, you know. And so I think it was really important for me to gain that perspective.

The— there's a number of people you profile in the book who also have some pretty harrowing stories, pretty painful family stories. Each of which illuminate kind of a different facet of the first-gen immigrant experience. You've got parents demanding that their children assimilate, but then their children realizing that America won't let you assimilate, or else they want to connect to this culture like you did, that they didn't have a direct or as direct of a connection growing up as they would have liked. You've got your parents demanding that the children not bow to the decadencies of American individualism and kids just trying to live their full truths despite that. Did you go to these students with this idea or did they come to you or was it— how did you get these people to talk to you like this?

Well, I'm an ethnographer. And so, you know, it's funny. I think one of the things about being a journalist, which maybe you can relate to, and being an ethnographer is like, some part of you that never turns off, right? So when you meet people, you just, you're like, well, tell me about, you know, how did that— and, and so that just is always there. But, but these were students that I have met over the course of my, my time and career and, and, and have connected with, right? So, you know, the, the, the individual who is Chinese American, you know, this is an individual I connected with. I was a professor at Pomona College, which is a small liberal arts college in California. And, you know, it's a residential liberal arts college, and I at some point was living actually on campus with my family. I was Dean of Women. I was living on campus, and I had students in my apartment like every night, right? And so, you know, I became very close with them and got to know a lot about their lives. And, you know, this was a student who worked as my research assistant and lived in the same, you know, residence hall that I lived in. And was, was really fighting some of the same demons that I was fighting. And, and it's the same with the other 2 who I, who I met later on. You know, as, as they told me their stories, as they told me about their lives, and as I watched them kind of evolve, I realized that, you know, their journeys mirrored not just my own, but it also mirrored the journey of the hyphen. So once I started to dive into like Dionysus Thrax, and, and, you know, like, where did the hyphen come from? I realized that, you know, the journey of the hyphen mirrored the journey of— mirrors the journey of so many of us who are hyphenated. And so these 3 individuals are— have all been students of mine and, and, and have all gone through this same kind of arc of, you know, okay, let me try to sort of fit on one side of the hyphen. Let me honor this one side. Okay, maybe that didn't work out exactly. Let me try this side. Maybe that didn't work out exactly either. And then finding that peace, that belonging, that solace inside the hyphen itself is just such a powerful thing. And I think, you know, for them, for me, it's saved me, you know, in so many ways, is just being able to live inside the power of that tiny orthographic mark.

The The story of the hyphen aligns with that story you're telling, that the 3 people in— the 3 students and you went through. It's also the part of that story involves Gutenberg.

Yeah, exactly.

Desire to publish poetry despite his father's demand that he live forever as a goldsmith. I see how in one— Did you mean for that literary device where you're sort of weaving in these, uh, your story, the story of these 3 other people, and the history of the hyphen, which also is, uh, involves the history of, of Gutenberg, uh, did you mean for that literary device to be, uh, depressing in that it suggests that, um, the struggle to integrate our many selves, uh, both the ones that we construct and the ones that society constructs for us is an ancient issue that will always— has always been with us and will always be with us? Or did you mean something different by employing that rhetorical device?

That's one way of looking at it, Rich. I mean, I guess, you know, my thinking was by weaving all of this in. So I think— so let's start with the fact that people who are anti-hyphen or anti-hyphenate they tend to only go back in history as far as World War II, right? So like Roosevelt and this whole like divided, you know, Woodrow Wilson, divided loyalties, you know, a hyphenated American is not an American. That's the John Wayne song, right? You know, and they— and that's where they end. And so it's like, no, we can't, we can't use hyphens. But if you go— what I wanted to do by going back to Gutenberg and actually by going back to Dionysius Thrax, who invented the hyphen, was actually to do the opposite, to bring hope to people and to say, look, this was created to soothe. This was created to make belonging, right? And so, yeah, you have people who've been fighting these many facets of their identities, but they've actually found a way forward, right? And so you have Gutenberg. Let's talk about him. You have Gutenberg, who in his heart of hearts, he's a poet. And that's what he wants to do. But of course, he's the son of a blacksmith, right? And so he's got these many identities. He's also got these— this identity of, you know, being, you know, Christian, and then his faith being a really big part of who he is, and yet also having these deeper philosophical questions. So he has all these identities. And what allows him to suture all these identities and to, like, stitch himself back up is this— is the hyphen. Right? I mean, he ends up using the— inventing the printing press so that he could write poems and making them beautiful by using the hyphen. Like, people always talk about Gutenberg's Bible and that perfect justification. Well, he couldn't do it without the hyphen. And so he was able to, like, bring his many selves together with the hyphen. So I was hoping that by weaving all of these things in, I would be— Weaving in some hope.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. That's a little bit better than my initial reading. But

like, oh great.

No, no, no, I was— I asked it willfully obtusely. But could you talk a little bit about where did the hyphen come from before it got into— before it saved Gutenberg's life and invented justification?

Yeah, absolutely. So It was invented, as I mentioned, by somebody who has, I think, the coolest name ever, which is Dionysius Thrax.

Strong, strong name.

You know, if that was my name, I, you know, I feel like I would be doing amazing things, right? Dionysius Thrax.

I would be inventing stuff too. I would absolutely—

Right? Like, you'd be inventing, like, new punctuation that, you know, lasts centuries and, you know, people are talking about on a device that you can't even imagine. It's the year 2021, right?

Exactly.

So he was a 2nd century Greek philosopher, writer, grammarian, and he was wandering the halls of Alexandria Library, you know, and struggling with the word as written and the word as sung, right? Because at the time, stories, words were sung, right? It was— you had singers, and he was struggling with how to signal to the singer, the reader of the written word, that 2 separate words could be separate but belonged together, so they had a beat, that there should be a rhythm. And he invented the hyphen, and the very first hyphen was— is what we would today call a sublinear hyphen or a U-shaped It was sort of under, right, sublinear. And it was there to be an indication. It's almost a musical device, but to show and signal to the reader and the singer that these are 2 separate words, but that are linked in this context.

Mm-hmm.

And so the hyphen was created to denote words or concepts that belong together. So, you know, if you're someone like me and you're searching for belonging and you find out that this amazing dude named Dionysus Thrax created the hyphen to create belonging. It was like this, you know, aha moment for me and for my 8-year-old son, who was like, oh, that is really cool.

Yeah, and he sounds like a dinosaur, so another 8-year-old son might also enjoy, you know.

Yeah, he just loves the name. He like wrote it on the whiteboard, he like underlined it, Dionysus Thrax. He was also a tax-evading So, and you know, not a very good hyphen there.

Yeah, yeah, it is. Is there? Yeah, there must be a tax evading.

Tax evading. Yeah.

And there is if I want it to be, right? Exactly.

That's right.

Is the idea. Well, and let's go— let's talk about hyphens for a second and where we're standing. And another person with an interesting name that you mentioned in the book is Angus Stevenson. A lot of the world's hottest cups of tea are served in the introductions of dictionaries, as, you know, any sort of people who follow grammar and dictionary fights know. The hyphen is involved in one of those furious battles. Stevenson, editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 2007, Got rid of, as you say, or as you write in your book, 16,000 hyphens in words, which caused a huge stir. He took out the hyphen in email, bumblebee, crybaby. He also took out the hyphen in ice cream, which I didn't know that there— anybody would put a hyphen in ice— in between ice and cream.

Oh yeah, if you think about it, there's ice, there's cream, Those are 2 separate things, but then you've got ice cream.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I, my point is I agree with all these decisions. I don't— I, I like email being one and bumblebee being one and crybaby being one.

Okay, but you wouldn't be ready for that. So here's the thing, right? All right, Rich, so here's the, here's the story that the hyphen itself— I mean, so yes, Yes. So as I write about in the book, 2007's SOED comes out and people are like, there's a hyphen thief on the loose. 16,000 words, you've taken the hyphen out. And my point was actually, no, the hyphen did its job and actually sutured. Right. And so if we think about ice cream, right. I mean, well, that doesn't always— let's go with email. Right. So when email first came out, your eye, if you just saw E-M-A-I-L, you'd be like, I, I, I do not know what that is, right? And I don't know about you, but I'm old enough to remember when we didn't have email, right? Or when it was just coming up, right? Like AOL, you've got mail, right? But it was called mail. It wasn't called you've got email. It was you've got mail, right? Uh, and, and so—

Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, the whole—

Right, Tom Hanks, totally.

It was a little small icon of an envelope. We were still attached to it. Yeah, absolutely.

That's right. And you had the little sound, right? It was like, bing, you've got mail. So your, your eye, your brain, you wouldn't have been ready to see email as one word. So in a sense, the hyphen is a way station— way-hyphen-station, or waystation, which is now one word. Uh, the hyphen is a way station between 2 separate words that can be stitched together as one.

Yeah. This— I like that. And I also, I yearn, as we all do, I think, for the rapid closing of open compounds.

This is the surgical work of the hyphen, right?

Yeah, to the extent that the hyphen is necessary, it brings us there. I champion, I appreciate, I love the hyphen absolutely for this reason. You— it could also be used for ill, you know. Uh, all things that create can also destroy. I thought of, uh, you know, in terms like the alt-right or female or words that kind of create, um, uh, that obfuscate or that can be used to harm. Do you think that ultimately the hyphen's power is used— could be used for good? Or is only this power of creation and suturing, or, you know, could it be used for bad?

How do you play that? Look, I'm an anthropologist. So I know that people make culture, culture doesn't make people. But I also know that language can be as divisive as it is unifying, right? So the same, you know, rhetorical devices that can bring people together can divide. You're absolutely right.

Yeah.

But I wrote this book to kind of re-harness that, the power, because I think that when it comes to a question of identity— and I know some of your upcoming speakers are going to talk about this— but I think when it comes to questions of identity and like, who am I and belonging, I actually think the hyphen has this quiet power that we've underestimated for a long time and that we've downplayed, right, because of what happened you know, during World War II, right? So my hope was that I would write this book and it would help hyphenated Americans or hyphenated people, people like my son, you know, feel like, no, that's something that I can be excited about. Like, I can find belonging in there. That it's not, you know, that the hyphen isn't meant to divide his last name, right? Mm-hmm. It's not meant to say pick your mom or your dad. Right? But it's to say, no, you are your own special thing. Like, and these 2 words, they belong together in him. Now, my last name is separate. It stands alone. His father's last name is separate and it stands alone, right? But it's hyphenated because he's— it's something new and it's something beautiful and it's, and it's something powerful for so many people who feel They don't belong.

A number of the examples that you use are— they're familiar to me having had this academic background. A lot of them are collegiate. You know, you're leaving the home and you're getting this, that separation from the family where so much of the culture is enforced and constructed and created. And then you have this moment when you can finally— where you're like, You're like, wait, excuse me, who am I? You know, and then you have that— is this dynamic that you're describing the same in your research outside of that collegiate class of people, basically?

Yeah, I mean, I guess in my research, what I've learned in, you know, 20 years now of doing ethnographic work is that you definitely enter a period of your life where you're having these questions, right? And it does dovetail for people who do choose to go to college, and who have the access, it does dovetail dovetail with those years. But there is definitely a moment when you transition from the home or the nest to your friends becoming your family, right? There's that transition period. And then you have your own family, right? Mm-hmm. And so, but there is that decade, decade and a half of kind of, where do I fit? Where do I belong? And then oftentimes people go on to make belonging by their own families. But there is a particular period where these questions are most heightened. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, my hope was that this book would speak to parents of, you know, of young people in those ages, but also young people in those ages. I mean, I think for me, my 20s were a really hard time. I'll be totally honest, right? 20s into my early 30s, they were a very difficult time because I didn't know who I was, like where I belong. And I think a lot of people don't know who they are, but it, you know, they can start to fit in in different ways. And but if you keep hitting, you know, roadblocks and obstacles and feel like, well, I just can't make this work, um, you know, I wanted to write this book to, to tell folks that, you know, you're not alone. There's a lot of us having these same questions, and it's okay. to not, you know, choose one side or the other. And it's okay to have a lot of identities, right? It's okay to have 3, 4, 5. I mean, Gutenberg was, you know, had his, you know, many identities. You know, you have the first person that I introduced in the book, you know, identifies as gay and Chinese and American. You know, there are other characters in the book who identify as rural American. or Jewish American. And so people have these many identities. And the idea is that you can suture them. You can find a power in bringing your many identities together in you.

Does that— there's the— you mentioned Teddy Roosevelt and his sort of viciously xenophobic speech. This is, I think, 19— please correct me if I'm wrong— around 1950. He's trying to run for president again. There's a second wave of immigration. In the U.S., and he wants to drum up the war machine, and he's thinking these German Americans and Irish Americans and Italian Americans are— there's a question of split loyalty. And so he creates— he gives a speech which you reproduce in your book that suggests, or, you know, that says— basically that says anybody who's holding on to this hyphenated identity is going to ruin the country because it's going to create this tangle of squabbling identities, not only within the person but within the country. Then there's going to be division. And so you can be American, but you can't be this hyphenated American. And I couldn't help but— and we were talking a little bit before we got on here— recall Barack Obama's 2004 DNC speech where he famously says, there is not a Black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America. There is the United States of America. You hear a chime there, a difference in degree, certainly, because Roosevelt was telling people to castigate anybody who would maintain a hyphenated identity. I don't think Obama would tell anybody to castigate others. But I guess, do you see the potential for divisiveness in claiming all of these hyphenated identities or not?

You know, I think, you know, we were talking about this a little bit before, but I think there's a big difference in the intentionality of the speeches, right? And I think, first of all, I think it's ironic that Roosevelt is up there saying that when he himself is a hyphenated American, right? I mean, the only folks who aren't hyphenated American are Indigenous. Folks, right? And so he himself was also a hyphenated American. So, you know, a little self-reflection would have been okay for him, I think. But, you know, he was coming off of a really bad trip to Brazil, and, you know, he got really sick going down the Amazon, and it didn't work out well for him. So, so I don't know if we can cut him some slack, but, you know, I think his intentionality was basically erasure, right? And he was saying, look, you know, that's a question of divided loyalty. That if you know, if you are a hyphenated American, you're not a true American. And I think that the difference is, is that Obama was saying he was talking about Americas, right? That that there that there's a there's a there's a larger America, and there are many kinds of Americans, right? And so, you know, while while Roosevelt was trying to erase that without being reflexive enough to know that he is a hyphenated he was a hyphenated American. himself. You know, I think what Obama's intentionality there was to say, look, you can still be an American, even if you have, you know, if you're Iranian American, if you're Chinese American, if you're African American, I mean, that you can have, you can, you're still, you're as American, even if you have a hyphen.

Yeah. Well, we've got some questions from the audience, if you're willing to take some.

Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, has there been a sudden proliferation in the use of hyphens in, in sentences? This person, uh, Candace, uh, says she's been seeing it more and she thinks it's because, uh, she's been seeing others use it more. Why would that be? I think I might just be lazy. Candace, you're not lazy. No,

no, you're not lazy. You're doing what everybody should be doing— more hyphens. Yeah. We want hyphenophiles. I'm a hyphenophile. I love hyphens. I wish my name had a hyphen in it. No, I actually think that people are using it to do exactly what Dionysius Thrax was trying to do, and to signal things that could be sutured together, right? You know, things that you might see as like 2 words that are very separate. So let me give you an example of something that's not hyphenated, but that I want to hyphenate. Which is civil dawn. So are you familiar with what civil dawn is?

Me? Yeah. Isn't it the moment right before dawn?

Right before dawn, right? It's like nautical, right? It's a nautical term. But most people see those 2 words and they're like, civil dawn, like their brain can't compute. They're like, are we talking about civil disobedience? Are we talking about—

A sun in a tuxedo?

Right, exactly. A very civilized dawn. Or like dishwasher soap, I don't know.

Yeah.

But, but, you know, but it's a really powerful concept if you think about it, you know, because my new book is about, you know, kind of this, an underground that's rising up, right? And that, you know, the underground that rises up, that, that, that's the dawn patrol, right, that, that pushes us out of darkness. And so civil dawn is this really important concept and moment. And yet, like, Right now we're not ready to look at Sybil Dawn and be like, those 2 words do not belong together. But if you hyphenate it, then we're ready to think, okay, well, what's the, what's the relationship between these 2?

Hmm, I agree. And I think it would be cool. Yeah, if we can't— if the hyphen ends up doing its work and suturing those 2 words together into a closed compound, then yeah, that would also just look cool.

That would look cool. It'd be like Dionysus Drax. Just a cool looking thing. Yeah, just

a cool

sutured his name into one.

We are like creating during this course of this conversation several hacker names also. So

that is true. I didn't think about that.

Several dot strong hacker name.

Strong or banned.

Or banned.

As the case may be.

Well, I think Kenneth is saying, are you seeing more hyphen? We we were talking before this we started chatting here about them trying to take the hyphen away from Asian America. I hadn't heard about that.

Yeah, so there's, there's kind of been a movement to take the hyphen out of there because the, the idea is that, well, these should be separate words because Asian is just describing Americans. So Asian is just a type of American. And it's like, yeah, but not necessarily, right? I mean, I would push back on that because you can be Asian, you can actually— it's not just a descriptor for American. And so if you would actually take the hyphen out, You, you, what you do is you unsettle the power dynamic there. You say, well, this is a descriptor of this instead of saying, look, an Asian American, that is a concept. You know, that is a person. You know, my son is Asian American.

Right.

So if you, if you say, well, this is just signifying that, then, then you're going to run into all sorts of trouble.

Yeah. It reduces an entire part of a person to a modifier. Yeah, yeah.

And an entire, like, billions of people who are Asian.

Sure, yeah.

And we're using them to just describing them. It's like, what? No. So I'm a little nervous about that, and I'm wanting to push back, and I'm hoping that this book came out in time to push back on that.

I hope so too. Can you talk a little bit more about the types of hyphens that you alluded to? I guess, you know, there's the

The u-hyphen, we've got the— that's the sublinear, right? And then it transitions into what we would now use as the sort of, you know, the hyphen that we would see in the, you know, the Gutenberg starts to bring it up from the sublinear.

There's a break?

Non-breaking hyphen. Yeah, so that's a hyphen that can be used to signify like that the word shouldn't drop down to the next Mm-hmm. Right? So that, that's to say that you can't break these 2, that you— that it's not an— and there's a big difference between a hyphen and an en dash, right? And so it's, it's saying like, this is, this is something that has to be together on a line for us to read it and process it properly.

So if you're writing a line on a Word document or something, and then you get to interesting, but interesting is too long to fit within the rule, you got to drop Esting down and you connect it with the little non-breaker.

Correct.

A linking thing. And this is the one that Gutenberg liked. This is what—

That was his favorite.

Yeah, that perfect justification.

Perfect justification. Exactly.

Good. Are there any other types of hyphens?

Oh my gosh, there are so many types of hyphens. I mean, more than I could have ever imagined. And then, you know, the code— I have a whole chapter about like this debating, you know, with coders or having the code for the different hyphens. They're like, why are we using hyphens? The code is so clunky. And then, you know, like, take it out of phone numbers. And then, you know, can you imagine, like, you know, I-405 or I-5 or, you know, like, you kind of need that, right?

Yeah. And I was thinking also of, you know, I— though I do— I'm not an abs— I just— I should mention that I'm not an absolutist Uh, when it comes to closing, uh, all of these compounds, because we do— I think like a word like ex-husband, you're just gonna want the hyphen in there all the time. Otherwise, you're always— just to make that 100%.

Let's make that one clear. That hyphen is staying. There will be— that's not going to be a way station. And if, if our friend Angus decides to take that one, I think there's going to be a lot of angry people on his

Yeah, exactly. Well, and you just don't want to live in like a world of ex-husbands or ex-husbands.

Wife or ex-wife. That's not like ex machina. Like, I don't know, ex-wife.

Yeah, no, that's a unifying hyphen that needs to represent division for— Be unifying.

Yes. Yeah,

yeah. Um, let's see. Uh, How long does it typically take for 2 hyphenated words to come together and become one word? Not fast enough as far as I'm concerned, but what have you discovered?

Well, I mean, I appreciate the time when it's a hyphen, like email. Like, I needed those, you know, 20 years of email, you know, of e-mail. It's a great question, actually. I think it just depends on the zeitgeist. Right? It depends on how we're using words and, you know, how they're sort of rolling off and when we're ready, you know, are we ready to see civil dawn, like, as, you know, one word? I think we're probably not there. That's going to take us a little while.

Yeah, it's a zeitgeist question.

I think it's a zeitgeist question. Yeah, like, we're ready for Bumblebee, but probably like when it was like, well, Well, why don't we call it bee? Like, what's bumble? What's— like, bumble is somebody who's bumbling down the street. So bumblebee. Well, we needed that hyphen for a while for our brains to be like, well, isn't that— are you saying that that's a bumbling bee? Like, that he's bumbling? That that's a bee that's bumbling? No. Bumblebee. Bumblebee. Bumblebee. And now we're ready. We're ready for Bumblebee.

You're right. Yeah, yeah, you're right about that. I was pretending like I was born ready for Bumblebee to be one word, but I wasn't. I

don't think— well, maybe, maybe we— maybe because it was zeitgeisty enough when we— I don't know, but, but I feel like we needed, we needed some space because I'm like, Bumblebee as opposed to what? As opposed to a different bee?

Yeah.

As opposed to a Stumblebee?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or Struggle Bee. Uh, yeah.

Yellow Bee. I mean, you know, Honeybee.

Honeybee. Is honeybee hyphenated? See, this is the problem with hyphens is I always have to be like, it feels like there could be a hyphen in there. Right.

And so, so then you've got a bunch of words. And, and I would say actually that email is still in that, in that way station airport phase, right? Where there— I mean, I have colleagues who still use e-mail. I do. I, I write it as email as one word, but I have colleagues who don't. And so I think honeybee is like that. I would probably use the hyphen just because I like to use it on like words I don't use that often. I'm just lazy with emails, so I just wanted to email because I write that word all the time, but I don't write honeybee that often. So if I were gonna write you a note about a honeybee, I'd probably put a hyphen just because I can.

Yeah, just because. Yeah, yeah, why not?

Cool. Yeah.

You don't want to mistake Or you don't want me to mistake it for a bee trapped in a sticky situation or something like that, you know.

And I also don't want you to mistake it for a bumblebee.

Right. Could you— someone's asking for a re-explanation of the difference between Asian American with a hyphen and one without. I think it— could you just restate that argument? Yeah,

absolutely. So I think the idea is when you take the hyphen out, the argument for those who are anti-hyphenating it are that, well, Asian is just describing American. So it's just Asian is just a type of American, as opposed to saying, well, Asian American can be its own thing. It makes Asian just the descriptor of American, as opposed to Asian has its own power, American has its own power, and then Asian American hyphenated is a

Cool. When did the hyphen take on this feminist bent in terms of how it came to signify a woman's place in a hetero marriage? What is the history of that? And when did it begin? A woman's place? I'm not quite sure I, I know what hyphen that the question asker is talking about. Do you understand that?

No. Can we get a little more clarification? Are they— I mean, I think it has a— I think that my— look, I'm a feminist writer, so I think the book has feminist undertones. I think I like— I'm drawn to the hyphen because it like explodes our understandings of identity, and it also makes us question the power of language, right? And how language can be for lack of a better word, hegemonic, right, in creating things, but how you can also then use it as a tool to sort of fight back, right? And how you have to actually shape it into a tool, right? That a hyphen itself— I mean, let's go Audre Lorde, right? The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Well, nobody would have thought of the hyphen as a tool. We had to actually make it a tool so that it then fits into Audre Lorde.

That helps me understand a question I was having trouble thinking about, which maybe I'll try to articulate it now and shoo me away if it doesn't make any sense. But how are you thinking about essentialism when you're thinking about the hyphenated identities? It seems like, you know, on the one hand, there is Iranian-ness, and then there is something called American-ness. But I don't know of a particular quality that you could isolate that you would call Iranian that wouldn't— couldn't also be American or vice versa. And so in one way, the hyphen explodes essentialism, but it also reasserts— hyphenated identity reasserts both of those in a kind— in a way, in that it does claim that that this is Iranian and this is American and I'm a little combo of both. And how do you— is that a false dichotomy or is that something that trips you up at all thinking about this?

I mean, it definitely trips me up. But I think the idea here is like there are certain things that are certain, let's say, cultural values that are not to essentialize and not to say that it is is a monolithic culture. Again, people make culture, and there's so many different types of culture that people are making every minute, right? We talked about the zeitgeist, right? But I think that, you know, I think that there is something about, you know, being— the idea with the hyphen is like that it can be so many things that you don't have to pick one or the other. And also, like, you don't have to fit yourself into like this mold of like, well, this is Iranian and this is an American. And you— it actually, it moves us past the dichotomy by saying like, you don't have to pick, you actually can, can, can, can be both. You know, I think for me this is really salient because, you know, if Iran and the United States have been at war for most of my life, who am I if both the countries that are me are at war? Right? These are 2 countries who are at war, and I— and yet I am a living embodiment of both. So that is different, right? Like, being Iranian American, it is different, right? Mm-hmm. And so there are certain things, and so there are certain— certain— and, and every Iranian American feels that, right? It's like, well, geez, you know, like, I, I think many people, when, when, you know, President Trump was elected and the Muslim ban you know, came out. You know, I remember my, my daughter, you know, came home from school one day and she said, you know, at school somebody told me as soon as Trump is president, you all are going to be sent home. And, and she came to me and she knew that I could never go back to Iran. And she said, well, you know, if Trump is president and we're sent home, but we can't— you can't go to— like, where, like, where are we going, right? Where are we supposed to go? So I actually, I think there is something to it that it's beyond— it does explode essentialism. It actually, I think, forges a different path altogether.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because it's— but it leaves the hyphen. Like, it explodes both sides of the hyphen, but it keeps—

It explodes both sides, but it says, look, you can make that little piece whatever you want it to be, right? That you can— that it has— this power, this tiny little thing has this power.

I love that. Yeah, that reminds me of a friend, my friend, poet Jaswinder Bhallina. He's got a book called Of Color that was— not that you should buy that book, you should buy this book. But then—

But I do want to buy that book.

I do want to buy it. Yeah, it's a good book. But he was talking about his experience— he's Indian American. He was talking about his experience after 9/11 and he was talking with another Indian American. It was right afterwards, and the phrase that came out of the conversation, you know, the phrase that the guy said was, this is gonna suck for us, but we should find the people who did this and kill them. And so the way in which the they and the us— Yeah. switched within that single sentence, what it really kind of brought home for him, the struggle. He describes it as being able to see on either side of the bullet hole, as, you know, like both the target, obviously, and the person offended by the, you know, that attack.

But I, and I think, so here's what I think, though. I think that's a great example, Rich, because I think that us focusing on— let's just take Iranian American or Indian American— and not focusing on the hyphen, it keeps making us be like, this side or this side, us, them, us, them, who's them, who's us, who's them, who's us, instead of being like, you know, there is this thing in the middle and there's a lot, there's like a lot going on in there, right? That you don't have to keep defining yourself against an other. So, so if you actually take that hyphen, it can be a much more kind of— this is much more meta, but it's like, you don't have to define yourself against an enemy. You don't have to define yourself against an other. You can define yourself on your own terms. That's the fundamental message, I think, of this book.

Well, that's great. We got— I'd love to end there, I think. But Yeah, is that all right?

Yeah, let's do that.

Good. Well, all right. Thank you so much for the conversation. It was edifying and wonderful. And you should— anyone listening now or in the future should buy Hyphen.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's been a great pleasure talking with you, Rich. And thanks so much to Seattle Town Hall for having me back.

Thanks.

Yeah, I want to thank you both too. This has been such a fun conversation and so interesting to pick apart this one little thing that we all kind just take for granted in our daily lives. Um, so, so fun. Thank you so much for bringing it to us. Yeah. I want to thank the audience as well. Thanks for your questions. Um, the book— the link to purchase the book is in the chat, so please use that. That's going to take you right over to Third Place, and you can purchase locally tonight. Um, I hope that we can have you both soon, sometime in the building when we are back in person, but until then, I hope that you have a great night and And stay safe.

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Candace.

Thank you so much, Candace.