These days, amid the news of war in the heart of Iran, and in the midst of my own confusion and inner turmoil, thousands of kilometers away from my homeland and my family, there is little I can do except write. Writing is what we Iranians do. In the darkest moments of our lives and our history, we write, we tell stories. Through writing, we soothe ourselves. Through writing, we find strength. Perhaps that is why literature and poetry are the greatest inheritance of the Iranian people. This is how we know to pull ourselves out of darkness. And though so much has been destroyed throughout our history, literature in Iran has endured. In truth, I believe the strongest weapon Iranians have ever possessed has been literature. And what in this world is stronger than words? To my mind, nothing.
Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was written so that the Persian language and Iranian identity would not vanish under the weight of Arab conquest, so that Iranians would not forget their dignity. And it succeeded. This great book is perhaps the most profound political-literary work in Iran’s history. Throughout its pages, it shows how, time and again, people arrive promising light and justice, and how slowly that power becomes corrupted. After Ferdowsi, Iranian identity did not continue within a unified political or religious state, but rather within a cultural, literary, and artistic realm. Iranians preserved the Shahnameh as if it were their national birth certificate.
When I look carefully at these words, I see that the suffering of Iranians has not come only from foreign invasions. The swords of our own have also left deep wounds upon the weary and ancient body of Iran. That is why Mohammad Reza Shafiei Kadkani, one of Iran’s greatest contemporary poets, writes:
Never had I seen your eyes
so drowned in blood and tears,
Oh, mother of sorrows,
Oh, homeland where we lived in humiliation
like prisoners of war for a lifetime.
Thus, we lived
And in sobs we wept.
Yet as I search again through this magic of words, I see that even within these elegies, something else quietly appears between the lines: hope. Hope is coded throughout these words. Hope for Iran to rise again. As Shafiei Kadkani writes elsewhere:
Iran does not fall.
It still beats life.
And like the phoenix,
it rises from its own ashes.
For a long time now, blood has flowed through the heart of Iran. For a long time, my motherland has been wounded and alone. And what is most tragic is that with every drop of blood that falls, hatred grows in its place. Revenge fills the emptiness. And today it is this hatred that frightens me the most.
What will become of us if we plant the seeds of so much hatred?
From every side, I hear voices of vengeance. Each side believes that if it shouts louder, if its cry becomes sharper and deeper, it will be the victor. But what will become of us amid these loud cries for revenge? What shall we do with this dark cloud hanging above us? Into what sea will these rivers of blood finally flow?
I am afraid.
Most of all, I am afraid of the echo of this darkness.