To our readers: These notes were written, in conversation with one another, in the immediate aftermath of the January 2026 massacre in Iran and the concurrent internet blackout. For months, we did not even know what to do with them. We, now, wish to return to them and present them as is, as documentation of our shock and disbelief in the face of an unimaginable state terror and how we tried to navigate an already-planned collective writing project in the midst of it.
1
poupeh missaghi
January 2026, USA/France
Around a year ago, I started facilitating an online class for a few Iranians who have, for one reason or another, chosen to write in English instead of their mother tongue of Persian. A few people have come and gone, but our core group has remained constant—two based in Iran, one based in Germany, and I and one other based in the US. We have gone through various phases with the class—from writing to prompts and exploring the boundaries of craft and content, to workshopping their own writings, to critically reading work by Iranians in diaspora, to reading works by non-Iranian writers in diaspora (writing in their mother tongues or in English) whose works we have delved into for inspiration. Recently, we decided to write a collaborative text about our collective experience.
As I begin writing my share of the text, the bazaar sector in Iran has gone on strike due to the economic conditions in the country and a new round of protests has started. I am headed to France for six months for research and writing. As I begin to pack and organize my documents, I pull out my Iranian passport, pause on whether I should take it, just in case, as rumors have it, these protests would topple the government and I could go home after many years of the impossibility of such a trip. My pause, with my passport in hand, is, however, quite short. I pull myself back to reality and put it back in the drawer it has been in for some years. I know I should not be so naïve, but then, as the night before my leaving arrives, I finally go back to the drawer and put the passport in my purse. Quickly, without letting myself think twice. I am praying that the violence of government forces against protestors does not escalate and simultaneously I am praying for my selfish wish to somehow come true. I know it is childish and impossible, but I also don’t want to demolish the spark that is letting me imagine a new possibility for my land, a return for me and others like me. I want to hold on to this desire.
As I arrive in Marseille and the protests continue, the internet in Iran gets shut down. Our class cannot come together on its regular day and time. I worry about my friends and students. The diaspora media report escalating violence. Even as someone who has for many years worked on collecting witness narratives and investigating state violence, I cannot fathom the news that is reaching us: the extent of the protests and the brutality of the crackdown is unbelievable. This is a bloodbath unlike any other in recent Iranian history.
English is not the language of the land on which the massacre has been committed, the language of the pain that is drowning me deep in itself. It is rather the language of a land choosing to be ambivalent to this pain, or worse, choosing to cannily manipulate it.
I do not know what to do with the news. The internet blackout in Iran goes on for a while. Our class cannot meet. Gradually, some form of access is restored. With the first rays of connection, videos and audios begin to trickle out. They are unbearable to take in. Then, one of us from inside Iran texts the others. He wants to stay committed to our group project and write his share; the others follow in his footsteps. The hours pass and I feel my body crumbling under the weight of the news, wondering how any writing is possible right now.
In a matter of days, Moeen is able to email his piece. Then Pooneh writes, then Neshat, and finally A., all in conversation with one another.
I read their beautiful pieces that are thinking through the connections of language and literature while locating themselves in their positionality in the realities of the world including an ongoing massacre in Iran, and I cry. This has been all I have been able to do here in this temporary displacement of myself, in a once again foreign country, surrounded by my third language that over years of not being used has become quite rusty.
At a small protest set up by Iranians in Marseille near the port, my knees buckle and I fall to the ground. My hosts here help me to sit at a platform close by. My blood pressure drops.
Color leaves my lips and my face. One of my hosts runs to get me some sugar. They help me to one of their apartments so I can lie down. All I have been able to do since the blackout has been to stare, at my phone’s screen, at the walls of the rental unit, at words in books, without really being able to understand what is going on, thousands of kilometers away in Iran, in my immediate surroundings in Marseille, or even in my body. I cannot focus on anything.
The day the statistics of 12,000 killed and many more disappeared or arrested begins to be repeated over and over again in various news media, I find myself losing my connection to my languages, both Persian and English, but particularly English, this language that has allowed me to be a writer and translator, to have a life outside of my country of origin for many years.
Now, it feels so alien to exist in it. It is not the language of the land on which the massacre has been committed, the language of the pain that is drowning me deep in itself. It is rather the language of a land choosing to be ambivalent to this pain, or worse, choosing to cannily manipulate it. More importantly, it is the language of non-Iranian friends and colleagues who can simply be uninformed about it or choose to stay silent in the face of it. For many days I cannot and do not want to engage with English. I become silent and barely speak to a friend who is visiting for a few days based on prior plans. If I can speak, it is only online with only a handful of Iranian friends abroad that I trust. But we don’t use many words . We just sit there together in front of our screens to cry and merely express disbelief.
This foreign tongue stands at the limits of bodily comprehension of what we Iranians in diaspora are witnessing from a distance. Except for a few English words in writing here and there that I jot down on my social media, I feel a sense of betrayal in my mouth when I try to speak of the atrocities happening in Iran even to the non-Iranian people closest to me. I do not want to translate, to transfer, to exist at any distance from what arrives in my body in and through my mother tongue. I do not want to be in any space other than the reality of the horror on the ground, even if my access to it is only through my phone.
Even my connection to Persian feels exploded from within. The limits of expression in the face of such brutality, in the face of bodies being vulnerable and losing their breath in front of bullets and daggers. Bodies of flesh and blood falling to the ground once met with bodies armored to the teeth with ideology and weaponry. What can we say through language?
I attempt to write despite feeling paralyzed, despite stuttering as if I do not know this language or do not want to know it anymore or want to actually estrange myself from it after years of finding home in it, only because I admire what the four people joining me here have been able to express through their words on the page. I jot down these words not because I am finding a possibility of being in language to resist or witness the killing spree in my land, but because I want to stay together, as humans of the mind and the body, with Moeen, Pooneh, Neshat, and A. as we continue to move through this shared inhumane darkness together.
2
Moeen Farrokhi
January 2026, Tehran, Iran
Of all the songs I used to have access to, I am only able to listen to the last one I downloaded, a track that a friend had sent to me, the day before the internet blackout. The title can be translated roughly as “Your battle is beautiful, with female outcry,” sung by members of the Afghan women movement—according to the only information I have, embedded on the track’s metadata. It’s been playing on repeat these days, the only way left for me to get connected to anywhere around the world. Afghan women, singing in chorus, in Dari, “How long should one look into the distance of the self and home, the home that was sold to the stranger, to the evil?”
[I have sent the song to you on Telegram, could you please check the translations and fact-check the information of the song?]
[Have you been listening to it as well?]
As for me, I haven’t directly witnessed the sheer violence unfolding on the streets, for I was always in the wrong place of the city, before or after the violence. I have no car, and Tehran is not designed for pedestrians. Each night, I check out the local map of the traffic around the city, which is still online through domestic intranet services, zooming in on the red lines on the streets to see what is happening where. I have, however, heard accounts told by other people. I’m trying to drink myself numb with a friend of mine who tells me that she saw a friend with one toe missing on his feet. “How did we end up here,” she asks, “seeing an amputated body, thinking well, that’s our new normal?” As the night goes on another friend joins us, only to leave an hour later. As soon as she gets home she calls me to apologize for leaving early. She is about to implode, she says, then she bursts out in tears. I can hear her mutter words through her sobs, “They’re going to execute the prisoners,” she keeps repeating, “aren’t they?”
Another friend whose friend had been on the streets recalls that the armed-forces shot at people aimlessly, but with enough precision to ensure that the bullets would hit someone, somewhere in the body. A family member calls to recount that she went out with her father in our hometown, only to check out what was going on. Then, out of nowhere, they started shooting saachme [look up the English word, I really don’t know how on earth I should know the English synonym and I don’t have access to search for it online] bullets, one of them hitting just one centimeter above her dad’s eye. His eye is now blood-riddled, he is only able to discern lights, waiting for the blood to be absorbed by the veins. She tells me that there were others, people with saachme right through their eyes, forever-blinded. And there were bodies in the hospital she took her dad to, she says, already dead. By the morning, the bodies were disappeared from the streets—the survivors were back in their homes, and the dead were in morgues, piled-up in trucks, lined-up in cemeteries, or, if they were lucky enough, whatever luck means to the dead, buried. In the daylight, the streets are once again desolate, only traces of what happened overnight remaining—burnt buildings, discarded traffic lights, skeleton of a bus yet to be transferred out of the city, blood-dried pavements. We are forced to live in the unexposed bodies of our houses, distanced from the self and the home [should the translation of the song change, alter the words here accordingly]. And the world.
There are no words to utter, only the emerging continuous nonverbal sounds of the survivors—mourning. The horror has already dawned upon the dead, the wounded, the witnesses.
One night, I hear some distant chants and cannot resist the urge to go out. For some reasons, I can only recall the night as foggy. People, in small groups, all in black like me, unidentifiable, are walking around in the main street. They can be militia in plainclothes or ordinary citizens, I cannot tell. We are strolling the streets, and nobody has the slightest idea where and how we can join others. The motorcyclists, also all in black, fearlessly drive through the network of streets, shouting at people, “Go back to your home,” “take off your mask, you moron,” [They actually said avazi, not sure if “moron” is the best equivalent here, but anyway]. They aim a green laser at me, at us, which means that if I do not move right away, they will shoot me, for they have spotted me. They can see me, hit me, whereas I cannot see them.
There are people on the roofs or balconies of their buildings who are watching the scenes—their heads, black silhouettes against the grey sky—guiding us to the safe turns of the streets: “Don’t go there, they are lurking.” I walk for an hour, with an unexpected sense of a steel ball scrubbing my gut, among people whom I cannot know if I can trust. The whole scene looks like an aftermath of a violence. It does actually turn out to be an aftermath, as a man walking by confirms, “I lost you when they started shooting saachme.” He tells his friend on the phone, “Meet me where you parked the car.” They must have moved their wounded bodies through the city to get somewhere more crowded.
Those who have been exposed to the violence viscerally, as was the case with me in the 12-day war in July, stare gazelessly, fixedly, at the horror. There are no words to utter, only the emerging continuous nonverbal sounds of the survivors—mourning. The horror has already dawned upon the dead, the wounded, the witnesses. The images and numbers, the body-counts are yet to unfold before the eyes of those who haven’t witnessed the massacre firsthand.
If I am still able to write, on this laptop, disconnected from the world, desperately chaining the words together, it is only by courtesy of living in the glass jar of the blackout and not knowing what exactly is going on. This blackout will probably end, the chilling images will surface, and there will be another darkness, a long silence. We will have to gaze into the terror, live through it, despite the fear, the despair, the dread. Our new meaningless words will perhaps emerge stuttering, out of mourning, though I am not there yet. [Are you?]
3
Neshat Sadatmansoori
January 2026, USA
I no longer understand what kind of time this is. I count the days. There is apparently nothing else to count yet. Twelve. As I write this, it is the twelfth day of the internet blackout.
When the protests began in late December last year, I had little desire to write about what was happening in English—not for myself, and not for anyone else. For some time, I had felt that every time I translated what was happening in Iran or wrote about it in English, even the unbearable could slowly become ordinary and lose some of its force.
In this context especially, I experience English itself as a violence. In the act of archiving and documenting—particularly in brief, ephemeral online forms—something dear is altered to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Its voice, its whispers dissolve like flesh in acid. English, with its immense capacity for publication and archiving, begins to function as a kind of surface upon which something can still be inscribed: a surface that seems to offer greater freedom to remember, to reveal, to make something visible. Yet the promise of that freedom is already shadowed by its failure. A language that can receive everything may preserve nothing at all; its hospitality may be only another arrangement of loss.
But this decision not to write doesn’t hold. Asking why I write in English is no different, in the end, from asking why I write at all. I keep thinking that to remain alive is to leave some trace before it disappears. Even if the trace is only the body itself: cold, waiting to decompose. My grief and guilt have other intentions. They send me inward—toward silence, toward disappearance. The opposite of any poetics that mistakes explanation for meaning. I remain somewhere between the two: I want to write because something may be lost; I cannot write because I already feel lost inside that loss.
As the protests intensify, images begin to leak out of Iran. Protesters tear down surveillance cameras and stare at the detached lenses left hanging in midair by loose wires. In a small town, people storm a chain grocery store, rip open sacks of rice, and throw the grains into the air. As the rice remains suspended for a moment, the image of a chaotic scene becomes something else entirely. It begins to resemble a blessed wedding ritual.
I keep staring at my phone, anxious and confused, watching one event lead into another, each shock followed by another one, while the political atmosphere online keeps shifting further toward the far right.
Most mornings, getting out of bed and making it to campus requires my partner’s persistence. I cry before my classes. I cry after my classes. I spend almost every break during my shifts at work in the restroom. I have gone days hearing only snippets of news from friends and family, and in the middle of the blackout, with nearly every line of communication with Iran severed, I keep staring at my reflection in the mirror. It is as though I need someone who looks like me in order to cry.
*
I think I have accepted disappearing. A little. Or I have accepted becoming faint. Is that the same thing? I am lying on my bed in my apartment in Denver when I see a report online saying that 12,000 people have been killed. It is nighttime. I take a sleeping pill and go to sleep, hoping to wake up from this nightmare.
In the morning, several news outlets repeat the same figure, but there is still no proof of the final number. I see smaller numbers. I see larger ones too. Ten thousand—how can anyone count more than ten thousand bodies? And yet there are the images. The videos. Rows of bodies. Piles of them. I close the online posts and open them again. A friend calls. She tells me that a friend of hers says he has walked past warehouse after warehouse filled with bodies.
Warehouses. How many bodies fit inside a warehouse? Thirteen thousand people. No. Fifteen thousand bodies. I try to understand what this number means. Eleven thousand. Or sixteen thousand, whispered in the corners today. Or twenty thousand. How can twenty thousand people be imagined? A football or baseball stadium, nearly full—one of those with fifteen to twenty thousand seats. When it’s full, the bathroom lines are endless, the parking lot is completely gridlocked, and getting out takes at least half an hour. Or a university—almost the entire population of a mid-sized campus: students, faculty, and staff… I think of Alcira Soust Scaffo, who hid in a bathroom at the university in Mexico during the military occupation of 1968, and of the fictional woman she later became, Auxilio Lacouture: toothless, still hiding in that bathroom, catching pieces of herself in a cheap mirror.
Witnessing no longer carries meaning. Identity, too, is nothing more than another form of this emptiness. I could be a number myself. What kind of identity can a number have? My body’s responses to recent events seem to be drifting into abstraction. They no longer attach themselves to a specific fear or memory. My body reacts not to an event, but to its magnitude.
Heat rises in my chest—enough to make me want to take ice trays out of the freezer and stack them against my body. My breathing thins out. I sit on the couch and find my mind occupied with the logistics of digging a grave in my apartment—how much space the living room would allow, where the furniture would go.
I feel that imagination has fallen behind reality—behind a reality that has itself become horrifyingly abstract. The only thing left to me is an attempt to preserve some form of connection. A connection I need now, after the total severance from those inside Iran, after their disappearance from the global form of communication. I need the smallest signs from a body that has almost fully entered a vegetative state, one that could just as easily be my own as it could be another’s—signs that would prove that I have reasons not to discard this pale, silent being.
Reasons I can truly believe in, deep within myself.
*
It is three in the morning, and someone is limping down the street outside my window.
Since the internet shutdown, I have gotten news of A. only through Moeen. After a lot of trouble, we finally got an email with his written text for our collaborative project. I keep thinking about the Sunday workshop meetings, and about how, over the course of a year, the first thirty or forty minutes of each meeting gradually stopped being about literature. That was, in many ways, comforting. Necessary. Writing in a second language is something we share; at least to some extent, we know its risks. Only someone who has stood at the edge of the cliff knows how to pull someone else back.
I think I have accepted disappearing. A little. Or I have accepted becoming faint. Is that the same thing?
But what is that cliff? The more precise question is where it is. I may never be able to say exactly. It is always there, in Persian, in English, somewhere in the condition of being at a distance and trying to leave a trace from within it. What frightens me is not distance itself (Writing always entails distance), but the possibility that at some point I may no longer be able to tell it apart from severance.
Before the internet shutdown, we had agreed to contribute to a collective text about writing outside our mother tongue. Moeen has managed to speak with Pooneh on the phone and told her that, even in this situation, he still wants us to write the piece. Of course, whatever we write can no longer have anything to do with the aesthetics we had imagined before the massacre.
His email comes while I am sitting in class, listening to my classmates discuss Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina. Thinking about literature in English feels like being bitten by words. I am living in two different realities at once: one coming from Iran and the other surrounding me in the U.S. One feels like receiving vital signs from a dead body sealed inside a body bag, waiting to rot. The other—honestly, I no longer know what it is. Something that cannot find any real relation to a world outside itself, something endlessly reproduced under laboratory conditions, without any concrete relation to what is happening beyond it. I will not try to name it here. Can it be worse than flesh decomposing inside black plastic? Certainly. It may even be magnificent: Someone in excellent health, running after something beautiful. With very long legs. With a serious concern for the nimbleness of the feet. Excellent feet, naturally. Still running.
I open the email in class and start reading. The piece is about himself. About the days when he had no access to the internet and only one piece of music was available to him, something he had downloaded before everything went dark and was now listening to on repeat. In his text, that piece of music has become his only connection, from inside his home in Iran, to the outside world. Throughout the two-page text, he has placed brackets inside his sentences, marking places where—because he has had no access to online dictionaries—he was unsure of the exact meaning or translation of certain words. At first, I think the brackets are there for us, his friends outside Iran, so that we can correct them. But then I see that he refers to them directly in the email and asks that they remain part of the text.
More than ever, I suspect that circumstance has decided the language for me. English, then. Not because I have anything to represent, but because it leaves me sufficiently unidentified.
A number among numbers, perhaps, meaningful only in relation to others. I move through this language because, for the moment, it remains open. Open to whom, I cannot say.
4
Pooneh Yekta
January 2026, Germany
As I write these words, there is another uprising against the dictatorship in my country. There have been weeks of digital blackout: the internet has been shut down, and even landline calls are impossible. I haven’t heard from my family and friends except for a few seconds of a call they have managed to make—just long enough to tell me they’re fine, or still alive, if they dared to say the words out loud.
As I write these words, I’m questioning the importance of writing them in a language other than my own. And then, as I place the word “own” next to “language,” I begin to question what “ownership” can even mean when it comes to language. Does it mean being able to write in a language that lands where you want the words to land, to whom you want them to land? Is writing in English, then, more like existing in a body that never quite fits—inhabiting it without ever fully belonging?
When news and stories of killed protesters leak out of that darkness, every memory of the past—of other protests, streets, people, the killed and the living—resurface. The wound opens again. And I begin to remember.
We are standing in the backyard of our university building in Tehran. It is early morning, February 2009. Our friends, and other people I know, slowly arrive—everyone in shock, in despair, in fear. It is a memorial for our university mate who was killed by regime forces a few days earlier during a protest. His body has been confiscated by the regime. They claim he was one of their own, carrying his coffin in their hands, saying his name as theirs.
In our university building, once there are enough of us to form something that can be considered a danger, they surround us. Most of them are dressed like us. But they are against us. They form a chain around us and begin chanting something I don’t remember anymore.
I just remember that we are afraid. We are shocked. We need to separate our bodies from theirs. We go inside—by choice or by force. We move by a collective instinct. We enter the amphitheater. Its steeply descending rows, and the fact that everyone sits with their backs to the stage, facing the door—to see who comes inside, to check whether we are safe from the “others”—allow me, seated higher up, to see most of their faces, and I feel a deep connection to all of them. Some of our professors are there too. It’s a relief, but also not. They look pale; they are as scared as we are. Someone goes behind the royal piano on the stage and starts playing. Everybody starts singing. Again, by the same collective instinct. Someone from campus security comes in. He goes to a professor and tells him something. Slowly, it becomes clear that the armed guards are headed onto the campus grounds, which is against the law, and then towards the amphitheater. The campus security wants us to leave immediately through a back door. The door opens. We walk out in shock and fear, but hand in hand, firmly tied to one another. But it’s too late. They break into the amphitheater and grab some of us from behind. They drag others outside, toward their vans. We scream, and still, through our screams, we can hear the sound of electric shocks—hitting bodies or just the air in order to terrify us.
Writing about trauma in a second language feels like running after a mirage. The horizon is vast, but there is nothing there to grasp.
As I was just thinking about the image of a mirage to write the above sentence, the word that first came to my mind was in my mother tongue. As I moved to open Google Translate to translate it into English, for a split second I thought I couldn’t, because the internet was shut down. As it is in my homeland. It’s as if thinking in my own language—imagining words in my mother tongue—physically returned my body to that place.
The same thing happened to me a few days ago during a protest in the streets of Berlin against the killing of people in Iran. Walking in shock and shouting a chant in my mother tongue against the dictator overlapped with a firework set off by a teenager somewhere nearby. My body froze for a second, waiting for my brain to give the order to run, as if I was in danger of being tear gassed or shut at—until I remembered that I was somewhere else in the world.
For a long time, I used to feel that my second language functioned as a shield, allowing me to mask things more easily, whereas in my mother tongue words and emotions weighed too heavily on my body. But then I began to think that maybe writing in a second language, precisely because it allows me to stutter, to limp, and never reach that mirage of perfect articulation, helps me expose whatever is inside, truly and wholly. Because that articulation can never form a whole, because it can never arrive, I can’t be fully harmed—or at least, I can stay with my body, remember, and remain.
With my second language, I can allow my body to sit in a bathtub with my ex-partner, or to look in a mirror and see my mother in it, to re-imagine my first memory with my father when I feared I might be ugly in his gaze, to write about a funeral years ago when one of my university mates was killed in a protest and his body was claimed by the regime forces as their own. I dare to exist in a way I can’t within my first language, because when we needed to, at the very least, grieve in our own language, our words were confiscated by the regime.
As our friends in Iran slowly reconnect—and then disconnect again—as they speak of dried blood on the streets days after the protests, of the beatings on their bodies, of rage and despair, we remember our own bodies years ago: beaten, afraid, enraged. I remember, and I pause inside those bodies of mine. I remember in that language of mine—silent and silenced, unable to speak, afraid even of words. And then I begin limping toward that mirage, in the hope that this time I might utter.
Yesterday, my mother was finally able to call me again. She had lots of stories to tell. She told me about her friend and her daughter, and what happened to them on the night of January 9th.
They are driving home—my mother’s friend and her daughter—late at night, after a family gathering. They open the garage door of their apartment building and drive in. She is parking the car when they hear gunshots. They rush to the door, hold it open, and look outside.
I began to think that maybe writing in a second language, precisely because it allows me to stutter, to limp, and never reach that mirage of perfect articulation, helps me expose whatever is inside, truly and wholly.
They see a group of young people—barely twenty—running toward them, trying to get inside and take shelter in their parking garage. Right behind them are regime forces. The forces start shouting at my mother’s friend: Close the door or we shoot.
She keeps the door open. The young protestors are already shot when they get inside. Two of them die immediately, in the parking garage. She calls an ambulance. Her young daughter stands there, shaking.
When the ambulance arrives, the medics suggest keeping the dead bodies there and to find a way to contact the families. If they are taken away, the families might never get them back, the medics say.
The ambulance leaves with the injured. The dead are left behind.
She has to find their parents’ phone numbers. Call them, as a stranger. Give them her address. Wait for them, with their children’s bodies. Welcome them. Carry their children’s bodies with them to their cars. Say goodbye. Cry with them. Maybe hug them. Then go back upstairs, into her home. Change her clothes. Maybe skip brushing her teeth. Go to bed and try to sleep.
She does all of that.
I write in a second language under conditions in which language, audience, and safety all fail to fully function. But writing becomes a way to remember my body differently—partially present, incompletely belonging—a mirror held in front of my body, reflecting survival.
5
A.T. Pouladi
January 2026, Iran
Dear friends,
I now understand that I no longer have either the desire or the will to write in English. And yet, here I am.
I want to inform you that I read all of your sections. Among them, it was yours, N, that compelled me to respond. To ask why is it so shocking—or condemnable—about people inclining toward the Right? People who have spent decades merely trying to survive, exhausted by nearly every form of civil resistance, yet still clinging to whatever remains possible on the ground to salvage a future.
And to ask: what is this violence that you ascribe to English?
Is it inherent to the language itself? Or is it structural—institutional—produced through the conditions under which English circulates, authorizes, and renders speech legible?
If it is this latter violence, then couldn’t it be argued that such institutionalization has long rendered the concept itself nearly obsolete—marking every attempt at naming it, or denying it, with its own trace? Every resistance, every refusal, already inscribed within its grammar, not as consent but as condition.
This is how I understand this violence: as a machinery that functions regardless of the color, ethnicity, or declared position of its agents. Whether one loves it or hates it, whether one speaks in its name or against it, it works. And with it so do the language, the institutions, the systems—and both the Right and the Left: an incapacitated Left, unable to encounter Iran and its history of social movements except through the lens of its own generalizations. A Left incapable of reception, unable to receive accounts from movements it has already excluded from its political sandbox.
Under the gaze of this Left, something obscene yet precise becomes tempting to admit: that by comparison, the violence of the Right remains visible—and therefore, at moments of exhaustion, appears more acceptable, even if it is in the form of “external intervention”.
I don’t fully know why I am writing all this, or whether my critique of your text is fair. What I do know is that, to this Left, the last thing I am willing to offer is another account of the massacre—neither what I have seen with my own eyes, nor what I have heard secondhand from other cities; neither the names of those I knew personally, nor those I now know only through death.
Instead, I want to propose something else.
In light of the history of Iranian civic resistance, our group’s gatherings, our care for one another, our ability to move between English and Persian—however imperfect—these must be recognized as contingent privileges. However valuable or negligible they may seem, they remain privileges. And they must testify to those who lacked them.
So I propose that beyond our notes for the submission of this collective conversation, there should be one more note.
A sixth note.
A white page.
A page for voices that never reached us. Voices that never found the possibility to join our gatherings. Voices without access to English, without our literacy even in our mother tongue, without our legitimacy in either spaces. Voices filtered out not only by the Iranian state’s violent control of the internet, but also by decades of stolen public space.
This page would also be for those the state has killed.
For bodies that refuse abjection. That refuse to become objects. Out of respect for that page, I stop here.
*
poupeh missaghi is a writer, editor, translator (between English and Persian) and educator. Her books include Sound Museum (2024) and trans(re)lating house one (2020), both with Coffee House Press. Her translations include Boys of Love by Ghazi Rabihavi (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), In the Streets of Tehran by Nila (Bonnier Books, 2023), and I’ll be Strong for You by Nasim Marashi (Astra House, 2021). She is a faculty mentor at the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR.
Moeen Farrokhi is a writer and translator based in Tehran. He has published, in Persian, a collection of short stories, The Pure Snow (Cheshmeh, 2016) and a long book-length essay, A Supposedly Non-Political Narrative of a Political Event: Iran’s Election 2017 (Cheshmeh, 2018). He has translated into Persian the works of David Foster Wallace, Aleksandar Hemon and Zadie Smith. His essays can be found in various English-language outlets.
Neshat Sadatmansoori is a writer, translator, and interdisciplinary artist currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Her work has recently appeared in Bombay Gin, Sinister Wisdom, and Exchanges. She was a recipient of the 2025 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship.
Pooneh Yekta is a Berlin-based writer and cultural worker. Her first book, The Limbless Octopus (2021), is a graphic novel published independently in English. She has also translated A Long Walk to the Water by Linda Sue Park into Farsi (Porteghaal, 2016).
A.T. Pouladi is a pseudonym.
Leave a Reply