Wordsmith & Worldweaver
When you die, I'll die with you​
A Plea for Peace
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My love,
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I am writing in the wrong language. It’s a language you cannot speak. I am writing a letter you’ll never read, confessing a love you’ll never know. I am writing in a language my own father can’t speak. But I have to write, whether the language is right or wrong, because if I do not write now, what am I for?
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When my father is 14, he stands on the rooftop of his village house, screaming “Death to the Shah!” His mother, in the courtyard, waves him back, waves him down, terrified of what he might bring upon himself and his house, as if the Shah were lightning that could come from the sky and strike down her boy to cinders. Maybe that is what politics are, to us, to me, to you – a strike from above, brutal, out of our hands.
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When my father is 15, the Iran-Iraq war begins. To protect him, my grandfather sends him abroad. This is a time of tumult for Iran – the revolution still as fresh as terror. In countries at war, boys the age of my father die with a gun strapped to their chest. My father protests that he’ll fight, but my grandfather is deaf to his pleas. He will leave.
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My father, still a boy, younger than I am now, goes into the small inner courtyard where the almond tree grows, the family home garden. This home where he was born. With his nails, he cuts a line down his chest, starting in the gap between both collarbones. He slices the flesh open and slides his hands under the skin, like a butcher separating meat from offal. His hand pushes through two wet ribs to grab his heart. When he removes it, it’s squashed against his sternum, a pressure of pulse against bone. Heart in hand, his fingers are sticky, wet, as if covered with afterbirth. There are some things one cannot rip apart with only nails, however sharp. He brings it to his lips. It thumps against his mouth.
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He bites off a chunk. The muscle is hot and throbbing against his tongue. The meaty, red taste spreads down his throat. He puts his heart back, squeezing it, again, between those ribs, and without bothering to close the open wound bleeding down his chest, without minding the pool forming in his navel, he leans over and scratches the dirt with sticky fingers, digging into the sand, until the shallow hole is big enough for him to spit in it, that red blob still beating that was a part of him.
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He buries the chunk; he stamps on it to flatten the mound. He pinches his skin back together over the wound, and his shirt back together over his chest, with nothing but pink thumbprints on the fabric to show what happened here.
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My father leaves Iran and his buried heart behind, thus ensuring, unknowingly, that I would love you.
Your father fights the Iran-Iraq war.
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It lasts eight years. It ends in a stalemate.
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When you are three or four years old, you toddle into the courtyard of your parents’ new house. The almond tree is blooming. Almond trees are always the first to blossom, even though they have all the spring and summer of a hot country to thrive in. They’re always in a rush, flowering at the first hint of spring, before the weather’s warmed.
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You sit beneath soft white petals and play in the dirt. You uncover, with your nails, something red and sticky with grit, hot, pulsing under your clumsy fingers. Because you are a curious child, you put his heart inside your mouth. It melts on your tongue. The meaty, red taste spreads down your throat.
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You and I are linked thereafter.
A beloved is a sticky thing – it sticks to skin and under nails, between your teeth. The taste of you when I walk down the school corridor distracts me from the day’s lesson. Your fingers stained red from pomegranate juice, curled around my cup. Your breathing lifts the blankets as I sleep.
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When I fall and bump my head, your hair grows white over my scar.
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Your memories that become mine are confusing glimpses. You, standing on a mountainside near Tehran, at night, the hot air cooled by the river cascading downhill. The stone path has been carved out into wet, glistening steps. Restaurants with blazing lights are sprinkled across the riverside, their reflections sparkling in the puddles. What stays with me is a small green budgie, trained to read people’s fortune, who for a sunflower seed will pick out a piece of paper stuck between two bars of its cage and bring it back to you. You receive a piece of poetry from Hafez. It states that your enemies will be destroyed.
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You do not know, yet, of any enemies. Although you will. And I, who never wished to have enemies, will inherit yours when the time comes.
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They are throwing bombs on you, my love. I pick up my pen and am at a loss for words. I feel so powerless. Is that why you are so passive? Is it me, my soul, my generation? Why is this grief inside me, not outrage? It’s marrow-deep. I cannot shake it off any more than I can throw away my bones.
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Yet if I do not write, what am I for?
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When you are little, you are told a story about your uncle, about one of your numerous uncles. He was teaching at school, but he refused to teach the compulsory Quranic education required of the new Islamic republic. The details of the story are fuzzy, but you do remember that a guardian walks into the classroom, armed, and slaps your uncle with the sort of force that makes mouths bleed.
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Your uncle lifts his chin. He shows the other cheek.
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The story always stops there. When you ask your father what happened next, he says they most probably hit him again – and again, and again. Still, the story stays with you. You want an enemy that you might stand up against and who, despite a strength you can never challenge, you will not be afraid of. You will not yield or do its bidding. Showing the other cheek becomes, for you, an act of resistance.
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We are in different countries, different languages, different lives. Yet when I dream of you, I understand every word spoken in Farsi, because you do. When you dream of me, you understand every word spoken in French – my native tongue – or English – my mother tongue – because I do. We know of each other like a shadow knows of its body, yet we couldn’t describe each other’s face, or speak each other’s name. Split hearts across two bodies.
You play with a Rubik’s Cube during long family dinners, endlessly. You never complete it. All progress gets undone, each new side unmaking the one that came before. The only time I pick up a Rubik’s Cube, I find the grooves and boxes so familiar, I’m nearly able to complete it on the first try, without thinking, to everyone’s awe. Your knowledge in my fingertips.
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You get arrested for wearing your hijab improperly, perched on a bun at the back of your head, a conscious rebellion. Your father comes to fetch you at the police station. Doing this is like playing Russian roulette – for every light slap on the wrist and go home now, young woman, there is one roll of the barrel in which you’re whipped, you’re raped, or you’re killed. Yet you keep playing.
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When Mahsa Amini dies, you cut your hair in protest. You bury it in the garden, beside the almond tree, those long and lovely locks spreading downwards into roots. The strands, plaited into a trunk, will rise. From your hair, a pomegranate tree will grow, its bark the exact shade of your skin, the earth the exact shade of your eyes. My shoulders feel lighter for days. You listen to Bella Ciao in Farsi on repeat. You listen to Baraye by Shervin Hajipour, the man who got arrested for singing. I feel your hope like an ache, like a knife stabbed through my hand, the terrible pain of hope. Hope perches in the soul, maybe, as the poet says, but its claws dig into your chest.
I am terrified that you will be hurt. You are my other half and I feel every bit of you and when you die, I’ll die with you.
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The protests die down, as all protests do, when the absolute strength of an authoritarian state crushes individuals in a hand oiled with their blood.
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Your life is steeped in politics. I am a bookish, nerdy sort of child. My troubles are paper-thin. Yet they are not unpolitical.
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I’m eight when I first believe I will be deported. I calmly tell my teacher to not be surprised if I’m not at school next week, as I might have to flee the country. She is stumped; she says nobody needs to run away from France. I disagree with flat certainty. The second round of presidential elections in France is pitting a right-wing president against a far-right president. If the extreme-right president wins, I am confident I will need to run away, and have already planned to live with my aunt and uncle in the UK. I’m too young to care about politics, but I do understand two things: that my government might hate me and that, sometimes, people have to leave their home behind.
I am not sad. I am not scared. I am a child and I understand these things as facts.
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I don’t remember what my teacher answered. I am a nice, white-passing, first of class, front row, French kid. Only my name gives away that I’m unwelcome.
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When I am thirteen, I tell a friend, jokingly, the story about how I thought I’d flee the country if the far-right was elected. Because it never happened, it has become, to me, a funny story, something amusing to tell, about the prescience – or lack thereof – of childhood. She scoffs at me. She puts her arm against mine and says, “Look, I’m browner than you. They’ll not deport you.”
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She is browner than me. That night, when I shower, the water washes off my skin. It pools in muddy streams at the bottom of the bath. A brown-beige rivulet between my toes. I run my fingers down my forearm, only to find my flesh has become translucent, the shade of cloudy glass.
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I wish I could rub at my skin and show my fingers and say Look, and say I’m real. But the more I scrub, the more I peel off, great swathes of me clogging the drain. I wish I could carry a knife with me and, when challenged, plant the blade into the palm of my hand and bleed blood a colour that shows that I am not inauthentic, unreal. I wish I could bleed Iranian so I could prove, to myself and others, who I am.
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Once rinsed, the ceramic is white.
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At the bazaar, you buy a copper ring shaped like a phoenix. A cousin tells you that the green flakes that peel off the copper is the evil leaving your body. You rub the verdigris rust off your skin and dream of a copper ring in the shape of a phoenix that you could place around Iran, that could burn away the evil within.
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For years I want to wear only copper jewellery, but I don’t know why.
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At home, after hope has fluttered down to roost, you pick up your old Rubik’s Cube and wonder why you never bothered finishing it. As you turn it between your fingers, as you struggle with the puzzle, you wonder if the Cube, like a revolution, can never be finished. It revolves, but it never ends. As soon as you slot away one piece you dislodge another. You put it back down.
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From a voracious reader I become a voracious writer, then a writer, full stop. I am at a panel with an American author discussing my last book, and she asks me, “Why is your main character so passive?”
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She disagrees with the way I handle revolution. With the way the main character stays out, away, from it all. I tell her I don’t think revolution is the solution, and am met with absolute blankness. We are at odds. Polite enough, we finish the panel, but I know that she will never understand me, that I will never understand her.
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I only realise later that her revolution is very different from mine. The American revolution is a story of success, of chasing off the British, of achieving independence. When I think of revolution, I think of my father on the roof, of a heart bitten in two, of exile. I picture the French revolution, which leads to the Terror, heads rolling, nobody safe, bodies split in two, and finally the rise of Napoleon, who starts a war with most of Europe, who is crowned emperor. How tyrants rise from revolution’s ashes. When I think of revolution, I think of Robespierre, who sent so many people to their deaths, who tried to shoot himself before they caught him, because he knew he wouldn’t be spared.
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He missed. His jaw was broken by the bullet. When came the time to kneel before the guillotine, the executioner ripped off Robespierre’s bandage, nearly taking the jaw with it. A messy, careless removal. I picture him, this man, kneeling, his upper row of teeth sticking out like a smile, his lower jaw hooked onto one end and dangling on the other, bloody gums, tongue lolling like a dog’s, while they push his head onto the soiled block where he sent so many others to their deaths.
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I think of Olympe de Gouges, telling her compatriots that if she could die like a man, executed by a guillotine, she should be able to live like one, with the same rights. They cut off her hair with the rest of her head.
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I do not know what tree grew from her roots.
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You think of revolution, and you see the streets of Iran rejoicing at having finally got rid of the Shah, you see Khomeini stepping down from a plane, waving, as everyone cheers, you remember how strongly people believed that this was the end of the struggle and the beginning of freedom, and you picture the cells in which they beat and kill and brutalise, these men, where they make people kneel with their jaws dangling, unaware that the meaning of revolution is to revolve, that to revolt is to perform a rotation, that when the time rolls around it will be their turn to kneel with a broken jaw on an unforgiving ground.
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Is that why you’re so passive?
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The American revolution was fought against an enemy that could be sent home, that lived overseas, that was, in some way, other. It’s different to fight an enemy that is a part of you.
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One day, you go to your home village to wash your grandfather’s grave. You kneel and knock lightly with a pebble on the gravestone, so he knows you’re there. Then you empty a plastic water bottle over the stone, rinsing off the dust. You think of a red piece of meat you ate without even washing off the grit. You watch your grandfather’s face, his small portrait staring sternly ahead. You feel, deeply, that is where you belong, this is where you are rooted, this is where you will blossom.
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Like almond trees, you too would bloom at the first hint of spring. You can’t afford to wait for the weather to warm.
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That same night your father, drunk, raises his hand to hit you. You stand as still as birds. You’re ready to turn the other cheek. Yet you always pictured an enemy doing this, not a person you love. You wait until he lowers his hand. That hit he does not take are like fingers digging into your cheek, scooping out your flesh and teeth and lump of tongue, the air whistling through your mouth thereafter.
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It’s different to fight an enemy that is a part of you.
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When I breathe, I feel the gap like a missing tooth. I am a person of ink and words and languages, even the wrong ones. I read to grasp the world. I read when you take risks, when you step outside, when the sun glazes your skin. I read books you cannot find, in languages you cannot speak, from a world just out of fingers’ reach. I read as you wash a grave. And then I write. Yet words are not a woman stepping outside her house and knowing she might be beaten for it. Words are not you, car windows open, wind in your hair, breaking the speed limit as you drive and laugh – laughing to dare your enemies to hit you.
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During the protests, I overhear my father talking to an Iranian friend at dinner. My father says that people who have fled Iran have no right to talk. He blames those who leave, those who live, for their cowardice, for a cowardice that doesn’t give you the right to judge whether people are fighting hard enough or not, resisting right or wrong, because you are just there with your words when they are there with sweaty bodies and bruises.
If he has no right, what right have I? Is that why you are so passive?
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My father tells me a story about his last visit to Yazd. A man there, a guide of some sort, for an attraction that now escapes me, was yelling at two Afghan women, because they were sitting on a bench. “This bench is for the tourists!” he shouted. “This bench is not for you!”
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My father stepped up, stepped in, and shooed away the angry man. He tells me, “At least I can speak up in Iran. No-one can tell me I don’t belong.”
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It goes unsaid that in France – the country of safety, the country of cowards – he cannot speak up, for if he tries to rise against injustice, he will be shut down or dismissed as a foreigner. He’s lived all of his adult life here. He’s raised his children here. How long do you have to live somewhere, how hard do you have to belong, before you have a right to criticise? Before you are authentic enough?
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When I speak English, I sound posher than posh. Do I belong? Do I belong enough to stand up when my country sees two women sitting on a bench and threatens them with bombs?
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To be mixed is to forever be inauthentic. To be mixed is to be an idea – that love, or sex, can make two people into one, therefore can make two groups, ethnicities, enemies, into one. It is an act of peace. To be mixed is to be an idea that some people don’t want to be possible.
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You visit the Pink Mosque in Shiraz and think of me. The stained-glass windows spread their bright colours on the rugs where you sit, placing light like shards on the floor. Is this what churches feel like, you wonder. The small paintings on the walls are influenced by European postcards, the guide tells you, which is why they picture green landscapes, which is why there’s these tiny figurative drawings amongst the pink tiles. The mosque closes late afternoon – you’re gently shooed off. Yet you’d like to stay longer. When you sit there, in the quiet, in the red and yellow and green light, in the soft dusk of the religious building, you feel closer to me. Briefly, our hands can touch.
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The man who committed a genocide attacks Iran. Our hands miss, fingers threaded through each other’s like ghosts. We lose that touch.
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He says Iran has a nuclear bomb. He has been saying so for thirty years. It is an old lie. The experts, the national agencies meant to disclose such things, the spies meant to keep such secrets, all agree that this is unlikely. It is an old lie polished to shine as if it were new, like brass can be burnished until it appears to be gold. The man who committed a genocide, who owns nukes, attacks a country who does not own nukes, breaking international law. You think of Iraq, another country attacked by a country who owned bombs for bombs it did not own. You think of the meaning of revolution. The Rubik’s Cube is red between your fingers.
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He says he’s helping the people of Iran rise up. You have been rebelling for as long as you have played with puzzles during long family dinners. People have protested against the regime and injustice since the revolution. Yet the man who killed truth feels emboldened to join the attack. Does he not know that war helps authoritarian regimes? Does he not know that violence, and a common enemy, strengthen these violent governments? Has he not read 1984, I ask, only to be angrily shushed by you, who doesn’t believe all truth can be found in books, who believe that sometimes words fail us.
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Instead you ask whether he believe the snakes coiled in his mouth, making his cheeks bulge, slithering down his chin each time he tries to take a bite out of the world?
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The pomegranate tree bears fruit in winter, even after having lost all its leaves. It’s a tree that endures. You show me the garden, the pomegranate planted beside the almond tree, the tree my grandfather planted and the tree that grew from your hair, side-by-side. You show me its bark, its naked branches. The one red fruit like a drop of blood.
You tell me, “Do not speak to me of resilience before you have borne fruit in winter.”
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I read a headline that coldly states The UK is discussing the legal implications of helping the US bomb Iran. What do you do when the enemy is a part of you? Your father hitting you, or thinking of it. My country hitting me, or thinking of it.
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Yet you are not grieving – yet. You’re furious. I feel your fury but I cannot share it. I’m too scared. I wonder whether a knife is enough to kill and skin a snake. I wonder what happens to pomegranates once they’ve been irradiated or uprooted.
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Tonight, I woke up feeling the earth shake under your feet. From the pounding of your heart, I knew the bombs were landing near Esfahan. You were awake, peering into the darkness, watching the flashes of light. Your mother had told you to flee, to go to your home village, to be safe. She was terrified of what might fall upon you and your house, of the bombs that could crack like lightning, coming down from the sky and striking down her girl to cinders. You told her, jokingly, that you’d stay to watch the fireworks. You stay. You watch. I write.
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The first word I write is Please. It doesn’t feel like enough. I write do not. But I don’t know how to continue. If you murder her you are murdering me. If you murder Iranians you are murdering yourselves. There is too much inside me, spilling out. One verb or all of them. Whatever I write, it cannot stop what’s happening – and what is it worth, if it cannot help you?
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Please,
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Do not
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Murder bomb eradicate destroy kill deny dehumanise obliterate vilify ruin lie about lie to attack belittle glance over look away ignore dismiss conflate with her government consider collateral damage reduce to a statistic butcher slice eviscerate burn slaughter carve up cut down bomb murder
My love.
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You are right, of course. What worth are pleas? Sometimes words fail us. Wrong word, wrong language. Wrong ears, wrong eyes. You cannot always be seen. You cannot always be heard. Sometimes you aren’t real, even when you bleed.
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If I turn the other cheek, to show them that they can beat me but they cannot make me do their bidding, is that an act of defiance – or is it an act of weakness?
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The bomb. The sound. When you die, I’ll die with you.
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Your absence like my ribs carved out, for what is absence but the feeling of your bones and stomach and gut, chunks of fleshy meat and skin, scooped out by bloodied claws and removed carelessly, a messy ripping out. A hole in your cheek. The unhooked jaw. I am partially hanging from one joint, and breaking.
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I have no weapons but my pen. I pick it up and stab it through the palm of my hand. Blood doesn’t rub off. Blood doesn’t lie. You do not feel the pain of the nib in your skin. You can never read this letter. But if I do not write something, I will have failed you, my love, even more deeply than the world has failed you.
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When people die, humanity dies with them. We are what we kill.
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I start writing this letter, leaving pink thumbprints across the page.
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Let’s not go through another cycle, displacing chunks of colour, red, blue, pink, green. Let’s think about how to solve the puzzle. It can be done.
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Let people who have bitten off their heart be spared.
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(Originally written June 2025. Published March 2026.)
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