A few nights ago Carlos and I stayed up late designing a thank you card for the orders going out this month. It says merci aziz. Two words. Neither of them originally Persian.
This is the thing about language, about culture, about everything we think belongs to us: it never quite does. Not entirely. And I find that more comforting than unsettling. There's a safety in that connection.
Kufic script (which is the style we tried to emulate in the design) came to Persia with the Arab conquest in the 7th century. Persian calligraphers received it, worked with it, made it their own, and it's still present in Iran today. Merci came from French, borrowed during the 19th and 20th centuries when French was the language of diplomacy and education across much of the Middle East and Iran. Its not the only borrowed word from French. I remember as a kid living in West Africa feeling confused when certain "Persian words" would pop up in the street.
And aziz itself, the word that is our name, our north star, the thing we put on every bag, every card, every piece of this brand, that word came from Arabic. It entered Persian and took on a new dimension. When used as Al-Aziz (The Almighty), it is one of the 99 names of Allah in Islam. It signifies power, dominance and invincibility, but somehow it evolved over time to mean dear, beloved one. We use it the way Arabic speakers use habibi. Warm, loose, generous. For your mother and your friend and a stranger you've just met.
So here we have a thank you card, designed in Maui by an Iranian-English woman and her Mexican-Irish husband, written in a script that migrated from the Arabian Peninsula, using a French word for gratitude and an Arabic word for beloved, all in service of a brand rooted in Persian heritage flavors that traveled first from Iran to Malawi, to Niger, to Kenya, to Maui and now to you.
Every thread has another thread behind it.
I used to think of this as a curiosity, a fun fact about etymology or history. But I think it's actually the most important thing. The idea of ours versus theirs asks us to draw a line that isn't really there. We can celebrate our diversity, the distinct flavors, practices and scripts and words that make each culture luminous, and still hold the deeper reality. We are not separate threads. We are one fabric.
Merci aziz. Thank you, beloved one.
