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.)
