It is a kind of evidence-production

*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism

Everything is burning now. It always was, but now the imagery in my mind’s eye has changed, become more geographically precise, become more embodied, become a newly upgraded beast with new purpose. It claws at my spine, a conflagration settling in my circuitry and spreading like an invasion. A map on Al Jazeera titled ‘US military presence in the Middle East’ shows Turkiye, Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Djibouti, the UAE, and Kuwait studded with ‘US-controlled bases in operation for at least 15 years’ and ‘other sites with US military presence’. The caption reads that 40,000 to 50,0000 soldiers are stationed across at least nineteen sites.

I feel that my body is being afforded less and less space to move and to be. I stare at this map of places I have never seen home to people I know and the US bases look like small pox, red and orange circles over a smooth body. I become sicker the more I stare at this map and I can’t stop staring. What is the story of how every single dot arrived here? How much life did it take in its arrival? How much life will it take in remaining? By the taking of life I don’t only mean death; I also mean all forms of suffocation, coercion, puppetry, and normalization of imperialism. I engaged, briefly, in the exercise of googling why each base was built. I couldn’t stomach it for very long, and at this point I am almost disinterested, too clogged already by their existence on the map to want to clog myself further with their gruesome origin stories. Others have listed and written about how US intervention ravages the countries it touches. I could list the names of these countries but I am wary of naming them only as containers of imperialism. I would rather learn to write of their beauty. To use their names with the pulse of their language, poetry, music, art, food, humor, nature, of every flavour of vibrancy, reflecting their first unsuffocated identities.

***

Many Iranis around me said they badly wanted US-Israel foreign intervention to topple the regime. One said to me: “I pray every day that the US and Israel bomb Iran to the ground and  then we will rebuild it.” And another: “The best thing that can happen is that the US and Israel invade and remove the regime with the least civilian deaths possible.” One, in the minority, said: “you cannot bomb your way to democracy”. 

In Tehran, The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Vahed) urged a continued people’s movement for liberation. Eleven days into the protests, they wrote: 

Iran’s oppressed people have repeatedly taken to the streets to demonstrate their rejection of the prevailing political and economic order and its structures of exploitation and inequality. These movements are not driven by nostalgia for the past, but by the determination to build a future free from the domination of capital—one grounded in freedom, equality, social justice, and human dignity. While expressing our solidarity with popular struggles against poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and repression, we categorically oppose any return to a past marked by inequality, corruption, and injustice. 

We believe that genuine liberation can only be achieved through the conscious, organized leadership and participation of the working class and oppressed people themselves—not through the revival of outdated and authoritarian forms of power.

Workers, teachers, retirees, nurses, students, women, and especially young people—despite mass repression, arrests, dismissals, and relentless economic hardship—continue to stand at the forefront of these struggles. In this context, the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Vahed) stresses the necessity of sustaining independent, conscious, and organized forms of protest.

We have stated repeatedly, and we reaffirm once again: the path to liberation for workers and the oppressed does not lie in the imposition of leaders from above, nor in reliance on foreign powers, nor through factions within the ruling establishment. It lies in unity, solidarity, and the building of independent organizations in workplaces, communities, and at the national level. We must not allow ourselves to once again become victims of power struggles and the interests of the ruling classes.

The Syndicate also strongly condemns any promotion, justification, or support for military intervention by foreign governments, including the United States and Israel. Such interventions lead not only to the destruction of civil society and the killing of civilians, but also provide further pretexts for repression and violence by the state. Past experience has shown that Western hegemonic powers place no value whatsoever on the freedom, livelihoods, or rights of the Iranian people.

***

The illegal US-Israel invasion arrived on my Al Jazeera notifications as I woke for sehri Saturday morning. Within less than 48 hours, they assassinated Khamenei and his family and struck a girls school killing at least 165 children. I see footage of an Irani man shaking a girls’ dismembered papery arm at the camera, that flakes unrecognizably at the wrists and fingers, crying: “The Zionist regime has again showed their crimes to the world. Look carefully at the hand of this child who came to study this morning.”

Many Iranis around me celebrate Khamenei’s death on social media and cheer for more illegal airstrikes. The schoolchildren are not mentioned in these posts. The previous US interventions in Iran, that strangled the country with illegal sanctions and eliminated its “beloved” elected leader Mosaddegh are also not mentioned. CIA documents declassified in 2013 state: “Once it had been determined definitely that it was not in American interests for the Mossadeq government to remain in power and CIA had been so informed by the Secretary of State in March 1953, CIA began drafting a plan”. To think that for every garbled statement made by a world leader there is an inescapably lucid document like this. 

Irani and Palestinian poet Daliah writes of the US empire: 

how can the empire  claim to liberate Iran

with oil in its mouth while my people learn  to breathe

through smoke it named  freedom

how can the empire claim to liberate Iran

while history still breathes

through coups it engineered 

through tyrants it restored 

while my people gasp

from the betrayal of the West

still echoing in every regime  

I fear the hijacking of desperation into a hysteria so pained and singular that people cannibalize their own history. I imagine the US-Israeli empire salivating over this. 

By now, US-Israeli strikes have damaged Iran’s hospitals and state TV. Tehran’s golden glittering Golestan palace — a world UNESCO heritage site — crumbles beneath US-Israeli bombs. In Tehran’s Ferdowsi Square, a woman leaves a hotel bombed in a “double tap” by US-Israel, screaming: “They killed all my people. They dropped one bomb. People went inside. They then dropped another.” She wails: “Oh, our youth.”

Al Jazeera reports that the US and Israel may be pouring weapons into Balochi and Kurdish minorities in Iran, eager to spark an ethnic civil war that balkanizes the country. The reporter says: “the only certainty is that more Iranian blood will be spilt with two nuclear powers pulling the strings.” 

Yesterday, many Iranis around me who supported the US-Israeli invasion looked weary and pale. My instincts to ask them if they’re okay have been sedated and confused: do they think this destruction is worth it, since the regime is gone? do they think it is so worth it that they would find my concern insulting?

I have made this apparent mistake before, when my concern was met with so much hatred and odes to destruction that I almost started trembling. Then there is the issue of my keffiyeh, that some find distasteful, that they see as somehow an emblem of the regime. I can’t tell if I’m allowed to show sympathy, if they would glare at it. I pray for them on my own, wait to see if the climate might change. 

***

My family and my family’s family in Kuwait, Dubai, and Bahrain see missiles. Their windows shake from Iran’s legal retaliation on US bases in the Middle East. But civilian infrastructure - hotels and buildings -  have also been damaged, violating international law. People are stranded with the closure of all airports. My cousin says “the kids are scared.” I can’t keep up.

Lebanon, yet again, is in flames by Israeli strikes. There is a Zeteo article in my inbox, sealed behind a paywall, titled “By Killing Khamenei, the West Created a Martyr – and Mainstream Media Is Ignoring the Muslim Backlash”. An excerpt says: 

The protests erupting across the Muslim world, the attacks on US embassies and consulates from Pakistan to Lebanon to Iraq, the mass demonstrations in cities from Karachi to Baghdad to Lucknow to Beirut – these aren’t just about geopolitics. They’re about the killing of a religious authority whose significance transcends national politics. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not Nicolás Maduro. He was not Saddam Hussein. He was not Muammar Gaddafi. Understanding the difference matters enormously for what comes next.

I’m still figuring out what this means. Iran under Khamenei was marred by human rights abuses; how did Muslims across the world who followed him reconcile with this? I peel open what it means to be Shia: X explains the beliefs and the rituals, Y contrasts it with the Sunni side. These two words — Shia, Sunni — have followed me quietly my whole life. I knew the sentiments, with my ties to both, but not the history. I feel like an entire lineage has clarified itself and opened up before me. I remind myself at odd times that it’s Ramadan, between the bursts of news and nausea and prayer. 

On Monday, even Z, largely non-political, put his head in his hands with eyes moist and reddening and said: “I don’t know where this is going.”

Today, the neuroscience graduate program emails “a message of support”, the way it never dared touch for the genocide in Gaza:

As many of you are aware, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East continues to escalate, and we recognize that a number of our students, postdocs, and their families are directly affected by these events… We want you to know that we are thinking of you during this incredibly difficult time.

I note that “the Middle East” includes Gaza. I wonder if the program knew this, if they would exclude it or eat their words or clarify if they found out. I wonder if they know that the institution is partly funding “the ongoing conflict in the Middle East” through its investments in arms manufacturers. The hypocrisy, yet again, is glaring. I’ll take their words at face value — their vague inclusion of Palestine — just for fun. 

Meanwhile, K and I can’t even talk about Palestine on our own terms nearing three years into the genocide. We scour the halls and rooms of our seven-floored building, looking over our shoulders. Must we whisper here? Can we be overheard here? Must one of us watch the door here? It is hilarious, this ritual. Nowhere to speak, nowhere to breathe: welcome to our free campus.

***

My documentation is not fast enough, my words slow and jarred and metamorphosing beneath my tongue. I write, and new Al Jazeera notifications pound away my language. I seize stillness and then my hands go numb. I pray, among many other things, for eloquence. 

Yesterday I turned 25. This takes me back to an evening in fall when I listened to Plestia Alaqad’s interview on Democracy Now. Amy Goodman introduced her as 24 years old. I was making breakfast as I listened, fumes of spiced chai in the air, and I recoiled: “she’s not 24, she’s my age. Strange, that Democracy Now would make that kind of mistake.” 2023 has buried my age three years deep. Plestia and I are still 22 to me, staring at each other across the Instagram oblivion of her reporting in Gaza. 

I have “Perfect Victims” tucked under my arm,  a half-read birthday gift. I carry it with me from room to room, even when I don’t have time to read it, like it’s a knob in my spine keeping me upright. El-Kurd is a writer who sharpens my own tongue and makes me realize that I am only just learning to “write with a knife”. Sometimes I wish I was a writer — studying and training as a writer — honing her craft with deliberation instead of stuffing it in the cracks or stolen stretches of her days. The only thing that will give me peace now is to write clearly what I am on only my terms as I wade through the burning headlines and walk into the sedation of the alien, unchanged lab, and to vessel myself into that armour.

Self-possession is key: to see clearly and read extensively and state bluntly. The truth is that this documentation — any documentation of this time — is archival. The richer my memory of how I felt and thought — nestled in a safe house, snow seeping into the grass beneath the bright spring sun, windows filled with light, London pulsing with stability — the more it may be a piece of zeitgeist that can be used to testify, later and subjectively, what it was like to live through this, to process it in real time, from a safe snow-globe of a place while tied to elsewhere. It is a kind of evidence-production. I’ll probably only understand it clearly years later. ♦