Farideh Fahimi

Foreignness is all about how you feel emotionally. I believe in myself and my values, and I do not feel foreign.

I arrived in Kastrup with my son in one hand and a suitcase in the other. My husband, who had arrived the year before, waited for me. We were in a new country and we only had each other. We had a second son. I started at the School of Dentistry, and we moved from Odense to Copenhagen, but then things started to happen. At first he began destroying things, and then he started hitting me. Back in Iran external circumstances had forced us apart, but now it was something inside which threatened to split our family apart. It was ourselves. I am a family oriented person, but I had to ask myself: how important is the nuclear family? Should I try and hold it all together until the children were old enough to move away, or should I show my children that mum is strong and that it is ok to say enough is enough? When I finally left, I lost contact with my brothers.

In her memoirs, Tove Ditlevsen writes about leaving her husband. She doesn’t do it for her own sake, but for her children and for the sake of her yet unwritten works. I mirror myself in her choice and the fight she fought. It is a fight of the kind that gives meaning to life and that gives you the strength to believe in the future and to forgive what happened in the past. I have translated the book into Persian, because I believe that 70 million people in Iran should have the opportunity to get to know Tove Ditlevsen.

53 years / female / in a relationship / children / studies dentistry / Herlev / from Iran / came to Denmark via family reunification in 1991