To our readers: These reflections were crafted in conversation with one another, in the immediate aftermath of Iran’s January 2026 massacre and the concurrent internet blackout. For months we were unsure about how to handle them. Now we wish to return to them and present them as they stand, a document of our shock and disbelief in the face of state terror and how we attempted to steer a preplanned collective writing project through the upheaval.
1
poupeh missaghi
January 2026, USA/France
Approximately a year ago I began guiding an online workshop for a small group of Iranians who, for various reasons, chose to write in English rather than their mother tongue, Persian. Some participants have come and gone, but the core has stayed intact—two in Iran, one in Germany, and two scattered across the United States. Our journey has taken us through several phases: drafting with prompts, probing the craft and its boundaries, critiquing our own pieces, examining Iranian diaspora writing, and then turning to texts by non-Iranian diaspora writers—whether in their native tongues or in English—for inspiration. Lately we chose to compose a joint narrative about our shared experience.
As I begin drafting my portion, Iran’s bazaar workers strike amid worsening economic strains, and fresh demonstrations erupt. I am bound for France for half a year to pursue research and writing. While packing, I pull out my Iranian passport, hesitating whether I should bring it “just in case,” since rumors swirl that protests might topple the government and permit a return after years of impossibility. I pause with the passport in my hand, but the urge to cling to a fragile glimmer of possibility proves stronger. I shove the passport into my bag, almost without thinking. I pray that the government’s violence against protesters will not escalate, and at the same time I yearn for that childish wish to come true. I want to keep hope alive, even if it seems naïve, because it keeps a door open for the future of my homeland and for others like me who long to return.
Upon arriving in Marseille as protests persist, Iran’s internet is cut again. Our class cannot meet at its usual time. I am troubled for my friends and students. Diaspora media report intensifying violence. Even for someone who has spent years gathering witness testimonies and investigating state brutality, the scale and ferocity of the crackdown feel unfathomable. This is a bloodbath without precedent in recent Iranian history.
English is not the mother tongue of the land where the massacre has been unleashed, nor is it the language of the pain that engulfs me. Rather, it mirrors a land choosing to remain ambivalent about this suffering, or even cunningly exploiting it.
I struggle to process the news. The Iran internet blackout endures for days. Our class cannot convene. Gradually some online access returns. When the connection flickers back, videos and audio pieces trickle in. They are unbearable to absorb. Then one of us inside Iran messages the group, determined to stay faithful to our shared project and to write his portion; the others follow suit. Hours slip by and I feel my body breaking under the weight of the headlines, wondering how any writing could possibly happen in the current moment.
In a few days Moeen completes his piece by email. Pooneh follows, then Neshat, and finally A., each composing in dialogue with one another.
I read their luminous writings, which explore how language and literature relate to their own positions amid a world’s brutal realities, including an ongoing massacre in Iran, and I cry. This is all I can do here in this temporary displacement, in a foreign nation where my third language has grown rusty from disuse.
During a small Marseille protest organized by Iranians near the port, my knees buckle and I collapse to the ground. My hosts support me and seat me nearby. My blood pressure dips. My face drains of color, and one of my hosts rushes to fetch sugar. They accompany me to a friend’s apartment so I can rest. Since the internet blackout began, all I can do is stare at my phone, at the apartment walls, at the printed pages around me, barely able to grasp what is unfolding thousands of kilometers away in Iran, in the city I am in, or even within my own body. I can barely focus on anything.
The day the tally of 12,000 dead and many more missing or detained begins to circulate, I find my grip on language falter, especially English—the very tool that has enabled me to be a writer and translator, and to live outside my homeland for many years.
Now this language feels alien to me. It no longer corresponds to the land where the massacre occurred or the pain that claws at me. It is the language of a land that seems indifferent to this suffering, or perhaps slyly manipulating it. Moreover, it is the language of friends who are not Iranian and who may be ignorant or silent in the face of what is happening. For days I retreat from English, speaking only with a small circle of Iranian friends online, and we do not use many words. We simply sit before our screens, crying and stunned, in quiet solidarity.
This foreign tongue seems to stretch the limits of my body’s comprehension of what diaspora Iranians endure from afar. With only a few scattered English phrases in my online posts, I feel a sense of betrayal in my mouth when attempting to speak of the atrocity to non-Iranian companions closest to me. I do not want to translate, to transfer, or to inhabit a distance from the on-the-ground horror, even if my engagement is through a phone screen.
Even my sense of Persian feels ruptured from within. How can one speak in the face of such violence, with bodies breaking, with life drained by bullets and knives? Bodies in flesh and blood hitting the ground, while those who killed are armored with ideology and weaponry. What can language ever express in the face of this?
Nevertheless I try to write, even as paralysis and stuttering threaten to overtake me, because I am inspired by the courage of the four others who joined me in this effort. I write not to resist or witness the killing spree with a different rhetoric, but to remain with Moeen, Pooneh, Neshat, and A. as we traverse this shared, unimaginable darkness together.
2
Moeen Farrokhi
January 2026, Tehran, Iran
Among all the songs I once had access to, I can only replay the last piece a friend sent me—the day before the internet blackout began. Its title roughly translates to a rallying chorus for female voices, a call to courage in the face of oppression, sung by Afghan women as they cry out in Dari: “How long must we look toward our own self and home, the home sold to the foreigner and to harm?”
[I’ve shared the track with you on Telegram; could you verify the translations and check the song’s details?]
[Have you listened to it too?]
For my part, I have not witnessed the violence on the streets firsthand; I have mostly been in the wrong place at the wrong times. I don’t own a car, and Tehran is not a city built for pedestrians. Night after night I study the local map of traffic—still accessible through Iran’s domestic network—zooming in on red lines to learn where things are happening. Still, I’ve heard the stories told by others. A friend of mine describes meeting a city colleague with a toe missing. “How did we arrive at this point?” she asks, “to witness an amputated body, and to think, is this our new normal?”
A different friend recalls hearing the armed forces shoot aimlessly yet with precision enough to strike someone somewhere in the body. A family member recounts stepping out with her father to survey the situation in their hometown, only to witness “they” begin firing bullets—some hits tragically close to her father’s eye, now bloodied, leaving him able only to see light. She recalls others with eyes pierced by bullets, forever blinded. The dead filled the hospitals, the streets emptied by morning, survivors retreating to their homes, the dead loaded into trucks, buried or hidden away wherever feasible. By daybreak, the streets lie desolate, their stories etched in charred buildings, fallen traffic signals, and abandoned vehicles. We live inside the hidden wounds of our homes, far from ourselves, far from the world.
There are no spoken words—only the sound of ongoing, nonverbal mourning from those who survived. The horror has already dawned on the dead, the injured, and the witnesses alike.
One night I hear distant chants and cannot resist stepping outside. In the fog of memory I describe the scene as if it were beneath a veil. Groups dressed in black mingle in the main avenue, indistinguishable in identity. Militia could be present or simply ordinary citizens, I cannot tell. We drift along the streets, uncertain where to join others, while motorcyclists—also clad in black—riders who fearlessly cut through the maze, scream at us to retreat and to remove our masks, while one green laser finds us and compels immediate movement under threat of gunfire.
Observers on rooftops or balconies, silhouettes against a gray sky, guide us to safer turnoffs: “Don’t venture there—danger ahead.” I walk in a haze of fear, a steel ball of dread grinding in my gut among strangers whose loyalties I cannot determine. The scene feels like the aftermath of a disaster, and another passerby confirms, “I lost you when they opened fire with saachme.” He urges his friend to meet him where their car is parked. They must carry their wounded toward more crowded spaces.
For those who have endured the violence, as I did during a 12-day conflict last July, the world becomes a blank stare—no words, only continuous, nonverbal expressions of mourning. The horror has crowded out the lives of the dead, the wounded, and the witnesses. The images and numbers will unfold before those who have not witnessed the massacre firsthand.
If I can write at all, on a laptop isolated from the world, it is by staying within the protective shell of the blackout and clinging to words with uncertainty about what is really happening. This blackout will end, the haunting images will resurface, and another long silence will follow. We may be forced to look into terror, endure it, and bear the fear and despair. Our new, fragile words might emerge through mourning, even if I am not ready for that moment yet. [Are you?]
3
Neshat Sadatmansoori
January 2026, USA
I no longer grasp what this time is or what it demands of me. The days accumulate, and there seems to be little else to count. It is the twelfth day of the internet blackout, and that is all I know for certain.
When the protests started late last year, I felt little incentive to write about them in English—neither for myself nor for anyone else. I have long suspected that translating Iran’s events into English can blunt their impact, turning the unbearable into something ordinary.
Within this frame English itself feels like a form of violence. In the act of archiving and documenting—especially in brief, ephemeral online forms—something precious is altered, almost dissolved. English, with its vast capacity to publish and preserve, behaves like a surface on which I can still inscribe memory: a surface that seems to promise freedom to remember and reveal, yet that freedom is already shadowed by failure. A language that can hold everything may still preserve nothing; its generosity may be another form of loss.
Yet choosing not to write feels unacceptable. Asking why I write in English ultimately mirrors asking why I write at all. I tell myself that to stay alive one must leave a trace before it disappears—perhaps the trace is simply the body itself, cold and waiting to decay. My grief and guilt push me inward, toward silence, toward disappearance. I oscillate between these poles: a poetics that seeks meaning through explanation and one that rejects it. I remain somewhere between both—wanting to write because something might be lost, yet unable to write because I already feel lost within that loss.
As the protests intensify, images from Iran begin to seep out. Protesters pull down surveillance cameras and study the dangling, unplugged lenses. In a small town, people storm a grocery outlet, tear open sacks of rice, and hurled grains into the air. The grains hover briefly, transforming chaos into something almost ritualistic, like a sacred wedding rite.
I keep watching my screen, anxious and bewildered, as each event feeds another and the online world tilts increasingly toward the far right.
Most mornings I struggle to rise for class, and I cry before and after each session. I spend every break in the restroom, and during the blackout I go days without hearing much from Iran, instead staring at my reflection as if I needed to see someone who looks like me to shed tears. I feel the need for a presence who resembles me to allow the tears to come.
*
I think I have begun to accept disappearing—just a little, perhaps. Or to become faint. Is that the same thing? I lie in bed in my Denver apartment, scrolling through a report that 12,000 people have been killed. I take a sleeping pill and drift off, hoping to awaken from this nightmare.
Morning arrives with varying tallies, yet no conclusive proof of the final figure. I see smaller, and sometimes larger numbers. Ten thousand, then more; how does one count so many bodies? And yet there are the images—the videos, the rows of bodies, the piles. I close the online posts and reopen them. A friend calls to tell me a colleague has passed by warehouse after warehouse stuffed with corpses.
Warehouses. How many bodies can they hold? Thirteen thousand? Fifteen thousand? The mind tries to grasp the scale: eleven thousand, or sixteen thousand whispered in corners, or twenty thousand. How can twenty thousand people be imagined? A stadium? A university? I picture people packed into a space with thousands of seats, where the bathrooms overflow and exit routes clog for hours. I recall Alcira Soust de Scaffó hiding in a university bathroom during a 1968 siege in Mexico, and the imagined image of Auxilio Lacouture—toothless, still hiding in that bathroom, catching fragments of herself in a cracked mirror.
To witness has begun to feel empty. Identity, too, seems hollow. I could myself become a number, and numbers can have no real identity. My body’s reactions to recent events drift toward abstraction. They no longer align with a specific fear or memory. They respond to the magnitude of the catastrophe rather than to a particular incident.
Heat climbs in my chest, enough to drive me to push ice from the freezer against my skin. My breathing narrows as I sit and imagine digging a grave in my apartment—for where the living room might fit a grave, and where the furniture would go.
I sense imagination lagging behind a reality that has grown horrifyingly abstract. The only thing left is to maintain some connection—something I desperately need after the entire break in contact with Iran, after the disappearance of those inside, after their severance from global avenues of communication. I crave tiny signs from a body that has slipped toward vegetative existence, signs that would prove I have reason to persist with this pallid, silent other person—signs that would prove there is a purpose to staying with this body.
Reasons I can hold on to, deeply inside me.
*
It is three in the morning, and someone is limping along the street outside my window.
Since the internet went dark, I have learned about A. only through Moeen. After much effort we finally receive his written contribution for our collaborative piece. I recall the Sunday workshops and how, over a year’s time, the first half-hour of each meeting gradually stopped being about literature. In many ways this shift felt comforting and necessary. Writing in a second language carries risks so familiar to us; only someone who has stood at the edge of a cliff understands how to pull another back from it.
I think I have accepted disappearing. A little. Or I have accepted becoming faint. Is that the same thing?
But where is that cliff located? The precise place may always elude me. It exists in Persian, in English, somewhere in the sense of being distant and trying to leave a trace from within it. What frightens me is not distance itself (writing always entails distance), but the possibility that I may not be able to distinguish it from severance.
Before the blackout, we agreed to contribute to a collective text about writing outside our mother tongue. Moeen managed to reach Pooneh by phone and told her that despite everything, he still wants us to write the piece. Yet whatever we produce cannot resemble the aesthetics we had imagined before the massacre.
His message arrives while I am in class, listening to my peers discuss Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina. Thinking about literature in English feels like being bitten by words. I am living in two bifurcated realities: one from Iran, the other surrounding me in the United States. One seems like vital signs from a corpse pressed into a bag, waiting to rot. The other—truly—an unknown entity, endlessly reproduced under controlled conditions, with no real relation to what is happening beyond the moment. I will not try to name it here. Could it be worse than flesh decaying inside black plastic? Perhaps, or perhaps it is beautiful: someone in perfect health chasing something called beauty, with long legs and a keen interest in the agility of their feet. Truly excellent feet, naturally, and still running.
Opening the email in class, I begin to read. The piece concerns the writer himself, recalling days with no internet and a single song he downloaded before the lights went out, now playing on repeat. In his text he marks places where he was unsure of a word’s meaning because online dictionaries were unavailable, using brackets to guide us—at first, I thought these brackets were for us, the friends outside Iran, to help correct them. Then I realize he is addressing us directly and asking that the brackets stay in the text.
More than ever, I sense that circumstance has chosen the language for me. English, not because I have something to convey, but because it permits a cloak of indistinctness.
A person among the numbers, perhaps, meaningful only in relation to others. I navigate this language because, for the moment, it remains incomplete. To whom it is open, I cannot say.
4
Pooneh Yekta
January 2026, Germany
As I put these lines down, another uprising against the regime is underway in my homeland. Weeks have passed under a digital blackout: the internet is out, and landlines are unusable. I can only catch a few seconds of a call here and there from family and friends, enough to hear that they are safe or still alive, if they dared to speak them aloud.
As I write, I question whether it matters if these notes are in a language other than my own. And then, when I place the phrase “own language” next to “ownership,” I wonder what it would really mean to own a language. Does ownership equate with speaking in a tongue that lands exactly where you want the words to land, and where you want them to reach? Is writing in English then a form of inhabiting a body that never fully fits, living inside it without ever feeling fully at home?
When news and stories from the killed protesters break through the darkness, memories of past protests, streets, people, the living and the dead surface once more. The wound reopens. And I remember.
We stand in the Tehran campus courtyard of our university, early in the morning, February 2009. Our friends and others I know arrive in shock, despair, and fear. It is a memorial for a classmate killed by regime forces during a demonstration; his body has been seized by the state, who insists he belonged to them, bearing their name as his.
Inside the university building, once enough of us gather to seem dangerous to the authorities, the guards surround us. Most are dressed like us, but they are against us. They form a line and begin chanting in a language I do not remember anymore.
We are afraid, we are astonished, and we feel the need to distance our bodies from theirs. We retreat inside—whether by choice or force. We move as a group, connected by a shared instinct. We enter the amphitheater. Its terraced rows face away from the stage toward the doors, so I, sitting higher up, can see most of their faces and feel a profound bond with them. Some of our professors are with us too. It feels comforting, yet it isn’t. They look pale; they are as frightened as we are. A man from campus security approaches a professor and says something. Gradually it becomes clear that armed guards are headed onto the campus and toward the amphitheater. The security personnel want us to exit through a back door. The door opens. We walk out in a state of shock and fear, holding hands, connected by a single thread. But it is too late. They break into the amphitheater and seize some of us from behind, dragging others outside toward their vans. We scream, and even as we scream, we can hear the electric shocks—hitting bodies or the air—to terrorize us.
Writing about trauma in a second language feels like chasing a mirage. The horizon expands, but nothing tangible is grasped.
As I was formulating that image, the word in my mother tongue surfaced first. When I tried to translate it into English, the internet was cut off, just as in my homeland. It’s as if thinking in my own language—conceiving words in my mother tongue—returns me to that place physically.
The same thing happened during a Berlin protest against Iran’s violence: I walked through shock, shouting a chant in my mother tongue, and the moment was interrupted by a teenager’s firework nearby. My body froze, waiting for the order to run, before I remembered I was elsewhere in the world.
For a long time I believed that writing in a second language could act as a shield, allowing me to mask emotions more easily, while in my mother tongue words weighed too heavily on my body. Yet I began to consider that writing in a second language—precisely because it forces a stutter, a limp, a certain distance from a flawless articulation—helps me reveal what lies inside, truly and completely. Because that expression can never be complete, because it can never arrive, I cannot be fully harmed—or at least I can stay with my body, remember, and endure.
With a second language I can permit my body to sit in a bathtub with my former partner, or to look in a mirror and see my mother reflected there, to revisit my first memory of my father when I feared his judgment, and to write about a funeral from years ago when a university mate was killed and the regime claimed him as their own. I dare to exist in a way I cannot within my first language, because when we needed to mourn in our own tongue, the regime confiscated our words.
As our friends in Iran slowly reestablish connectivity, only to lose it again, speaking of dried blood on the streets, of beatings dealt to their bodies, of rage and despair, we remember our own bodies from years past: battered, frightened, enraged. I remember, and I pause inside those bodies of mine. I recall them in my own language—silent and silenced, unable to speak, fearful even of words. And then I begin to limp toward the imagined mirage, hoping this time I might finally utter a word.
Yesterday my mother managed to call me again. She had many stories to tell. She spoke of a friend and her daughter and what happened to them on the night of January 9.
I began to think that perhaps writing in a second language—precisely because it allows me to stutter, to limp, and never reach that perfect articulation—helps me expose what lies inside, in a true and complete way.
They are driving home—my mother’s friend and her daughter—late after a family gathering. They open the garage door of their apartment building and pull in. They hear gunshots. They rush to the door, prop it open, and look outside.
The group of young protesters, barely into their twenties, races for shelter inside, pursued by regime forces. The troops shout at the door: Close the door or we will shoot. The door remains open. The young people are shot as they try to enter. Two lie dead in the parking area. An ambulance is called. The medics insist it’s best to leave the bodies there and contact the families later, otherwise the families may never recover them.
The ambulance departs with the injured; the dead are left behind.
She has to locate their parents’ numbers, call them as a stranger, share her address, wait for them, with their children’s bodies nearby. She must welcome them, carry their children’s bodies to their cars, say goodbye, cry with them, perhaps embrace them, and then go back upstairs, change her clothes, skip brushing her teeth if she must, and try to sleep.
She does all of that.
I write in a second language under conditions where language, audience, and safety fail to function fully. Yet writing becomes a way to remember my body differently—partially present, incompletely belonging—a mirror held up to my body, reflecting survival.
5
A.T. Pouladi
January 2026, Iran
Dear friends,
I have come to understand that I no longer possess the desire or the energy to write in English. And yet, here I am.
I want you to know that I have read all of your sections. Among them, it was yours, N, that compelled me to respond. Why is it so astonishing—or condemnable—for people to lean toward the Right? People who have spent years 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 attribute to English?
Is it intrinsic to the language itself? Or is it a structure—an institution—produced by the conditions under which English circulates, authorizes, and renders speech legible?
If this is the latter form of violence, could one argue that such institutionalized power has long rendered the concept 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 a condition.
This is how I understand this violence: as a mechanism that operates regardless of color, ethnicity, or declared stance. Whether one loves it or hates it, whether one speaks its name or against it, it continues to work. And with it the language, the institutions, the systems—and both the Right and the Left: a Left that is unable to engage Iran’s history of social movements, unable to engage accounts from movements it has already excluded from its own political sandbox.
Under this Left’s gaze, something obscene yet precise becomes tempting to admit: that the Right’s violence remains visible and, in moments of exhaustion, can seem more acceptable—even when framed as “external intervention.”
I do not fully know why I am writing this, or whether my critique of your piece is fair. But I do know that, to this Left, I will not offer another account of the massacre—neither what I have witnessed myself, nor what I have heard secondhand from other cities; neither the names of those I used to know, nor those I now know only through death.
Instead, I want to suggest something different.
In light of Iran’s long history of civic resistance, our group’s gatherings, the care we show one another, and our ability to move between English and Persian—however imperfect—these must be recognized as conditional privileges. Whether they seem valuable or negligible, they remain privileges. And they must bear witness to those who lacked them.
So I propose that beyond our notes for this collective dialogue, there should be one more note.
A sixth note.
A blank page.
A page for voices that never reached us. Voices that never found the opportunity to join our circles. Voices without access to English, without command of our mother tongue, without legitimacy in either space. Voices excluded not only by Iran’s state violence over the internet, but by decades of denied public space.
This page would also belong to those the state has killed.
For bodies that refuse to be diminished. That refuse to become mere objects. In honor of that page, I will 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 living 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 a variety of English-language outlets.
Neshat Sadatmansoori is a writer, translator, and interdisciplinary artist pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Her work has appeared in Bombay Gin, Sinister Wisdom, and Exchanges. She was a recipient of the 2025 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship.
Pooneh Yekta is a writer and cultural worker based in Berlin. Her first book, The Limbless Octopus (2021), is a graphic novel self-published in English. She has also translated A Long Walk to the Water by Linda Sue Park into Persian (Porteghaal, 2016).
A.T. Pouladi is a pseudonym.
