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Freedom in Speech: Sanaz Toossi’s English
For these characters, learning a global language is both broadening and restraining.
It’s the gesture that another of the play’s characters makes when trying to describe how English as a language feels to her, how it’s different from her native tongue, Farsi: She pauses, then hovers her hand palm-down, undulating it in easy waves, the way you do when you’re sitting in the front seat of a car with the window down and your arm out in the summer breeze. There’s our own national crisis, our harrowing shift back toward a reigning ethos of bigotry and oligarchic greed, along with the heavy knowledge that the women of English —set in Iran in 2008—are walking toward a future that contains, among so many deaths, that of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police. Roya (the regal Pooya Mohseni)—a well-off grandmother learning English at the urging of her son in order to be able to speak with her granddaughter, who’s being raised with no Farsi in Canada—starts to waver in her sense that she’s still a part of her own family, or that they, striving to assimilate, retain any connection to their ancestral home.
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