My story begins in a place which has been, for most of Iran’s modern history, synonymous with torture, captivity and death. It is a place that has torn apart families, shattered ideals, forced confessions, crushed dissent, executed resistance, hijacked revolutions. It is a place that has seen many broken, gone mad, fallen never to get up again. This cursed place, the black hole in Iranian modern history, is my birthplace.
I was born in 1983 in Evin Prison. My parents were jailed on charges of leftist anti-revolutionary activism against the newly established Islamic Republic under the despotic rule of the 80-year-old Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. Dissidents of all political backgrounds were arrested on similar charges. Some, like my parents, survived and eventually came home. But in the summer of 1988, the last year of the Iran-Iraq war, thousands of political prisoners were executed by the regime, their bodies dumped into mass graves. Families were forbidden to mourn their loved ones.
The 1988 massacre marked one of the darkest moments in Iran’s post-revolutionary history. A history that has continued to be filled with stories of violence, repression and loss. With tears and blood and children who’ve lost their parents and parents who’ve lost their children. It has not been quiet for a long time in Iran. Generation after generation of Iranians have fought for freedom and equality. Generation after generation have been suppressed. And they have risen again. And the battle continues.
I was born and raised living and breathing that resistance, and the pain, and a sense of isolation I have never been able to shed completely. As a child, I imagined the whole country to be my enemy. Not only Khomeini and his clerics, not only the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia, but every Iranian; every one of those Iranians who was quiet while my pregnant mother was interrogated, while my 27-year-old uncle was executed, while my grandfather was denied milk for his grandchildren because the entire neighborhood considered his daughters anti-revolutionary traitors.
This Iran, Khomeini’s Iran, was my enemy. An enemy in secret. No one was supposed to know about my animosity, about the bad blood that ran between us. The most I could do when everyone chanted his name – and later that of the next Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei – in reverence and glory in the school courtyard, was to refuse to chant along. Their names were hollow on my tongue. I was seven years old.
Yet, this wasn’t the only Iran that existed. There was another parallel Iran: a beautiful, intimate, protected world, which I considered adamantly as my own. This Iran was founded on my grandparents, grew roots through my parents and became tall and flourishing with all our prison friends and their children, whose stories were so similar to mine. This world was hidden and exclusive, shared only by a few. In it, I felt safe. I felt that nothing needed explanation, nothing needed lying about or hiding. I could just be, I could relax because there, everyone already knew.
I did not live in Iran for a long time. When I was 12 years old, my family moved to California to be closer to my mother’s family. In America, things changed. There was no one to be afraid of, no one to hide our past from, but I still didn’t speak about what had happened to us. There seemed to be no reason why I should. No one knew anything; no one asked anything; no one seemed interested. Soon, it all began to feel strangely distant and blurry and at times even irrelevant. Even the air felt altered here, as if it were made of different material than the air in Iran. It was a free sort of air; it let you be, it let you go, it let you unwind the heaviness. And little by little my story began to feel odd, out of place in its immense, unreal tragedy. Everyone around me seemed to live such intelligible painless lives. There was school and soccer practice and sleep-overs; there were parents and family barbeques and Christmas parties. What was I to say? To all the luminous, uninterrupted, dauntless regularity? How was I to explain my past to them? When it had never made any sense to me either, when I myself could not truly comprehend the vicious buckles of history that clasped onto me, to my story, my life. No one would understand. No one would know what to say. I would be left without answers, even more than before. I would be left with that terrifying sensation of void. There was no fear, yes, but how could I tell my story to anyone living by the big, bright, blue ocean and expect them to understand?
Yet, not speaking about something has never meant forgetting it. That past had been engraved on every particle of my being. It was just a matter of time for it to come back and reclaim me, for the voices to reach me again, for the stories to demand to be told. The story of my mother who refused to give names under interrogation even while going through labor, the story of my father who made a bracelet of date stones for a daughter he had only seen once in Evin courtyard, of my grandparents who had to raise three grandchildren on their own while fleeing Iraqi bombs falling over the city. I was physically far away from that land, but I knew the stories by heart. That young Sahar had never left me. She had been there all along, biding her time, waiting for the moment to break the silence that had enveloped us for decades.
More than 30 years have passed since the days when I stood alone in the school courtyard, refusing to chant along. 30 years of tumultuous history, of uprisings, of defiance, of prisons and streets. I have watched my country change before my eyes. I have watched it grow; I have watched it move forward. My age-old enemy is no longer mine alone. Now the entire country seems to know where the darkness lies. Day after day, I watch courageous Iranian women come out, fighting for their dignity and freedom, fighting to take the narrative back into their own hands. Day after day, I watch them dare to envision a new future not only for themselves but for the entire country. No one no longer chants, “God is great, Khamenei is my leader.” Now they take to the streets, chanting, “Woman Life Freedom.” They burn their hijabs, chanting, “Freedom Freedom Freedom.” They stamp their feet, throw their fists up, chanting, “Death to Dictator,” and “We don’t want an Islamic Republic.”
I am no longer alone. Those despotic names seemed to have turned hollow on everyone’s lips. We are no longer outnumbered. No longer a minority in pain and suffering and dissent. Now, it feels as if the entire country has become a minority with us. Now we are whole. Now we all have shared stories and hope and despair and ache and defiance and all the ingredients that a people need to set themselves free. I no longer have two parallel Iran. Now there is only one, where girls dance and sing and fight and love and rise. It is mine as much as it is theirs. It is ours.
I do not know where the current uprising in Iran will lead. But I know there is no turning back. I know that no matter what, the people of Iran have and will come out with their heads held high. And when the real change finally arrives, it will not be overnight. It will not have all the answers. It will not be perfect. But it will be ours. It will emerge not from our personal trauma but from our collective memory, not from our private despair but from our combined hope, not from our solitary need for revenge but from our shared moment of defiance. When the change finally arrives, it will not merely begin a story; it will carry the story forward.
Contributor’s Notes
Sahar Delijani was born in Tehran, Iran in 1983 and migrated to California in 1996, where she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in Comparative Literature. In 2006, she moved to Turin, Italy where she lived for over ten years and wrote her debut novel, CHILDREN OF THE JACARANDA TREE. Published in 2013, the novel has been translated into 30 languages and published in more than 75 countries.
CHILDREN OF THE JACARANDA TREE was a Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group selection, an Indie Next List, a CBS Best Book Club Picks, a candidate for France’s Le Livre de Poche Prix des Lecteurs Sélection, and a finalist for Italy’s Elle Gran Premio.
Twice a Pushcart nominee and longlisted for the 2022 Granum Foundation Prize, Delijani’s writings have appeared in The Bellevue Review, Slice Magazine, Read it Forward, Perigee Publications, BBC Persian, Zeit Online, DW Persian, Corriere della Sera, La Nazione and more. Delijani has been a Fellow at Hedgebrook Foundation Writers in Residence, Granada UNESCO City of Literature, and Nuoren Voiman Liitto in Finland. She currently lives in New York City, working on her second novel.
