Photo: FX/Hulu
I was in my mid-20s, a few years after moving out of my parents’ home, when I grasped that I was beginning to forget Persian. I grew up speaking the language every day with my family and every weekend with overseas relatives called via prepaid long-distance phone cards, the universal immigrant currency. When I befriended other Iranian Americans in high school and took Iranian literature and film classes in college, I’d slide into Persian then too, gossiping during Middle Eastern Dance Club and discussing paper ideas with my professors. I was always better at understanding the language than speaking it, but I was comfortable with my conversational proficiency — with the certainty that if I ran into a Persian-speaking stranger, I could hold my own. But after graduation, I no longer spoke Persian every day, and the pressures of work and life began pushing certain words out of my brain. The words for “fork” and “knife” begin with similar ch- sounds (changal and chahghou), yet I suddenly couldn’t remember “spoon” (ghashogh). Persian has flowery and formal phrases used as more polite ways to express gratitude, congratulations, and other warm sentiments, and I’d start emphasizing the wrong syllables whenever I tried to say them. My memory was backsliding. Regularly reading chunks of Dariush B. Gilani’s meticulous An English Persian Dictionary helped but didn’t fully reverse the regression.
A decade later, I still feel that exasperation when I reach for a word that doesn’t materialize, that’s on the tip of my tongue or the edge of my brain but refuses to move forward. I still feel the shame of not being better at something that’s supposed to be a part of me, and I still feel elated when I invoke a phrase, term, or expression I thought I had lost. It’s like standing in the overlapped portion of a Venn diagram of diverging lives: a moment of clarity amid confusion, and the relief that a defining element of my cultural identity isn’t totally gone. Maintaining a connection through language to where you’re from originally (without all the xenophobia that normally comes with that question) is a uniquely immigrant experience, explored in films like Minari, The Namesake, and Tigertail and TV series such as Fresh Off the Boat, We Are Lady Parts, Pachinko, and Little America. But I’ve never seen it more beautifully captured than by a perpetually braggadocious, sexually voracious, and luxuriously caped vampire living on Staten Island.
Three of What We Do in the Shadows’ primary vampires are immigrants, and the heritage of Nandor of Al Quolanudar, Nadja of Antipaxos, and Laszlo Cravensworth of, uh, white England roughly align with the ethnic and national backgrounds of actors Kayvan Novak (Iranian British), Natasia Demetriou (Greek Cypriot British), and Matt Berry (British British). That synchronicity allows the actors to cheekily dig into hundreds of years of tropes and stereotypes about their cultures (with the ludicrously affected accents and vocal patterns to match) and means WWDITS can find creative comparisons between the undead experience and those of exodus and diaspora. An expat can be an outcast and an other, and the show maps how that same isolation can apply to a vampire, too. Nandor acutely feels the burden of eternal life: His birthplace, Al Quolanudar, is no more, and unlike the married Nadja and Laszlo, he has no forever partner (despite Guillermo’s endless loyalty). His loneliness is often his defining characteristic.
In the season-one episode “Citizenship,” Nandor learns his former home Al Quolanudar was “dissolved” in 1401 and worries, saying, “What do I have? Nowhere is my home.” (Al Quolanudar is fictional, but Nandor clarifies to Guillermo it would be in modern-day southern Iran; Persian-speaking WWDITS fans theorize the country’s name is itself a pun in the language.) After Nandor fails his American citizenship test, he broods: “I have no country … I have no people. I’m like a little lost duck, floating about in the middle of the ocean.” Guillermo tries to comfort Nandor by reminding him of his vampiric power, but the character’s boastfulness (“I will not bow down to your pathetic bureaucracies! It is you who will bow down to me!”) is persistently revealed as a front. Nandor so craves love and friendship that in the seasons to come, he joins a wellness cult and willingly pulls out his fangs to remain part of that community, commands a genie to bring his 37 wives back from the dead, and regularly defies vampiric tribalism to defend Guillermo despite the familiar’s Van Helsing heritage. Nandor’s wistfulness is born of his bone-deep belief that something is missing from his perpetuity, and these moments emphasize how Nandor being from a place that no longer exists is key to his dispossession.
In season-two episode “Ghosts,” Nandor and his roommates conjure their own ghosts to help them address any unfinished business. Nandor’s, Nadja’s, and Laszlo’s specters appear frozen at the moment when they were transformed into vampires, meaning they’re the most Al Qolnidarese, Antipaxan, and British they’ve been so far. Their ghosts aren’t yet diluted by hundreds of years spent away from their birthplaces, and especially not by decades of inertia in the American suburbs. But Nandor can’t communicate with his ghost because of their language barrier, and WWDITS keeps its English-speaking audience in the dark: Ghost-Nandor’s Al Qolnidarese dialogue (which is actually Persian) goes largely untranslated, and the episode’s closed captions are phonetically inaccurate. The tension builds between Nandor, embarrassed to not remember the language he spoke while mortal, and Ghost-Nandor, irritated at being magicked into this place where no one can talk to him. Ghost-Nandor attacks a lamp; Nandor offers only a paltry sob bekher (“good morning”). Each assesses the other and finds him lacking.
If you don’t understand Persian, you’re absorbed into that disorientation and amused by Novak experimenting with line delivery and body language to play against himself. If you do understand Persian, you glean the insults Ghost-Nandor lobs his counterpart’s way, including comparing him to a donkey. And if you’re like me — an Iranian American who doesn’t speak Persian as well as they should and gets in their feelings about it — the dual-Nandor drama exposes the fragile bonds between heritage, language, and identity, an emotional wallop as profound as Ghost-Nadja is horny.
The two Nandors’ enmity (Nandor ashamed by his lost language, Ghost-Nandor aghast at him for losing it) intensifies until, finally, a moment of shared sentiment: Ghost-Nandor recognizes his horse, Jahan, in one of the many self-portraits lining Nandor’s chambers, and Nandor realizes his ghost’s unfinished task: saying good-bye to the horse they both loved. (Jahan died when Mortal-Nandor, starving during a difficult battle, killed and ate him.) In further demonstration of his dialect displacement, Nandor refers to his most loyal companion, whom he had named Jahan, the Persian word for “world,” as the anglicized “John.” But now that Nandor understands what motivates his ghost and faces the feelings inspired by the language he forgot, he’s able to make peace with his past actions.
After performing a séance to bring John/Jahan to this plane, Nandor thanks the horse who was closer to him “than even members of my own family,” who was always there “when I felt a little sad,” and who sacrificed his flesh so that Nandor could live — and has the grace to let his ghost have a moment alone with Ghost-John/Jahan. As Ghost-Nandor regales their horse with the Al Qolnidarese endearments to which he was accustomed in life — azizam (“my dear”) and asalam (“my sweet”) — Nandor doesn’t interrupt or interfere. He shares the triumph and pleasure of their reunion, and the Nandors’ attention and adoration feeds Ghost-John/Jahan emotionally as the horse once fed them literally. Ghost-Nandor and Ghost-John/Jahan’s departure into the next metaphysical plane symbolizes how it feels to give up parts of ourselves as we age, acquiesce, and assimilate. It also argues that our actions after that loss are what matter most — how we create room for our past alongside our present and future and provide compassion to the person we were for making us the person we are.
Eternal life in What We Do in the Shadows is not only predicated on a parade of death; it provides a space for second chances. A word leaving your vocabulary is like a tiny part of yourself being siphoned off, and a steady drip can become a flood. Nandor speaking his birth language and sharing time with Ghost-John/Jahan, who was such a representation of Nandor’s Al Qolnidarese life, is an opportunity to reverse that flow, to honor the elements that forged him, and to strengthen the roots that grew him. As long as Nandor walks and talks, Al Quolanudar survives in some small way, too. Nandor, Ghost-Nandor, and Ghost-John/Jahan exchanging the Persian for “good morning” as they part could be seen as ironic, since none of them will ever see dawn again. But that greeting, like so much of the series’ wordplay, is less literal than figurative. Sob bekher also implies blessings on a new day. It’s fundamentally a measure of potential to be realized — for unearthing a long-buried aspect of yourself — and that singular colloquialism doesn’t diminish how those opportunities exist in nearly any time, any place, and any language for our vampires to seize. In “Ghosts,” What We Do in the Shadows finds the right words.
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