The head of our research group posted a message in the Baleh app telling us to come to the university building sometime between tomorrow and next Saturday to collect our personal belongings and take them home. For now, only three of the eight members of the group will have their six-month contracts renewed. The rest of us have been sent home.

This is the same Tajrish that kept its spirit even during bombings. The same square that stayed alive through Nowruz with its vendors selling sabzeh, samanu, and haft-seen decorations.

This is a collection of accounts from different cities in Kurdistan. With the internet and phone lines cut, it has been difficult to reach people in Iran. Still, I have tried to speak with as many people as I could, through friends, and sometimes even strangers I came across by chance. 

Outside, groups of regime supporters drive through the streets again. Motorcycles and cars carrying Iranian flags. They shout “Allah-o-Akbar” and “Heydar Heydar.” They do not look like mourners. They look like they have just come from a political rally.

The streets feel empty, cold, and frightened. Security patrols are everywhere. Armed forces stand in the streets, sometimes with armoured vehicles... When I hear the jets, I feel a wave of panic. But when I go up to the roof to see where the explosion happened, the panic somehow becomes less intense.

By late Friday, the morgue was full. “We had no choice,” Ahmad says. “We moved the bodies to the dialysis ward and laid them side by side. We even ran out of body bags. We wrapped them in sheets and tied the ends.”

No one knows what will happen next, but everyone knows this kind of life—this suspended, existence—cannot go on forever.

It felt like being thrown back a century — into a time when the only news you had was what you saw yourself, or what you heard from a neighbour.

Iranian literature after the revolution is on the margins of the world system and not global as such. However, it is important in several national systems, because it speaks to several national literary contexts (French, German, American etc.)

If we take the Constitutional Revolution as the first moment when Iranian music closely engaged with a social movement, the last century of political upheaval leaves a clear record in song.

Even if hope is an illusion, we must hold onto it, share its light, however scant and brief, because otherwise we will never change the world, we will give injustice the last word. This much is certain: despair and indifference lead nowhere.

If the “telos” of a historical narrative is 1979, then all roads lead to the fall of the shah and the rupture that occurred in the US-Iran relationship during the hostage crisis. In those narratives, most of which are political in orientation, the shah’s reform program is not taken seriously.

I had arranged with a couple of friends to go, one morning, to the gates of Evin Prison, simply to stand with the family of our friend behind bars, if only to offer a little encouragement, to let them know they were not alone, not abandoned in their vigil.