Far away from my homeland I don’t remember, I am seeing better than I have in years. It is imperative to keep resisting

Sanam Mahloudji

The Observer

On Thursday, I called a cousin in Los Angeles to check in on him. We hadn’t spoken for a few months. Sometimes I disappear from my birth family because it is easier – many of the older generation hold so much pain it’s difficult to bear. But I wanted to check in on my cousin because he recently underwent surgery for cancer. First, I wanted to talk about Iran.

The reported reason for Israel’s attack on June 13 was that Iran was weeks away from a nuclear bomb. Israel has been claiming this for decades; yet it is estimated to have between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads of its own and is the only country in the Middle East which has refused to allow international inspectors to view its nuclear facilities, and refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty.

After the bombing of three nuclear sites by the US it seemed that a terrifying “escalation ladder” would put the whole region, and perhaps the world, in peril; for now a ceasefire holds, but the landscape is alarmingly unclear, moment to moment.

Every ounce of my attention is on Iran, like it was nearly three years ago after Mahsa Amini’s murder for “improper hijab”. Everything else in my life I am filtering through the experience of being Iranian. It all feels like distraction from an originating wound; one I share with millions of strangers around the world.

Los Angeles is home to the largest number of Iranians outside Iran and is the city where I grew up after my family left Iran during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. It is a place I love but also feel like I don’t want to return to, not least because of a poisonous autocratic administration kidnapping immigrants off the streets of LA, sending in marines to suppress legitimate political protest.

Most Iranians inside and outside Iran aren’t fans of the Tehran regime and wish it gone: but this is where the consensus largely ends. An Iranian online commented that how quickly our fighting turns into “petty squabbles is indicative of a traumatised people”. Forty-six years ago, in 1979, a blood-and power-thirsty collection of men usurped a vibrant, diverse country that had sickened of its millennia of autocratic kings. There isn’t an Iranian I’ve come across who doesn’t want Iran to be a secular democracy, that doesn’t want Iranians to be free.

While my LA cousin worries about projecting his own hopes on to people whose lived experiences differ from his own and wonders if there’s a way to support internal change from afar, an old friend, also in Los Angeles, wrote to me that while she didn’t want innocent civilians to die – how else would we ever be rid of the Islamic republic when the Revolutionary Guards, true believers of the regime, defend it to death? They are “legit evil people”, she said. My Iranian optician in London believes that Israel is doing well by paving the way for Reza, the son of the last Shah of Iran, to return to power.

On my father’s side of the family, we have a WhatsApp group. Beyond wishes and prayers for safety and reports from within Iran of whereabouts and evacuations, sharing petitions, memes and lists of hotels that are offering free rooms to those evacuating the cities, of course there is political discussion. A cousin from Washington DC who doesn’t trust the monarchists among us said: “If [Reza] is serious, he should be heading to Azerbaijan or Armenia to cross the border and stand with the people in Iran at this dark hour.”

I don’t think it is possible to bomb Iran into democracy. It is also morally corrupt, an act of imperialist colonialist domination, not liberation. Iranians deserve a clear message from the world’s countries rejecting war and supporting their path to self-determination on their own terms.

Too often, it seems that at best, most of the world sees the Iranian people as a problem it wants to simply forget about. The average person’s unwillingness to pay attention, especially in the west, is something we see to a greater degree with Palestine and the ongoing genocide. Now Netanyahu has jiggled the spotlight away from Gaza even more, surely part of the aim.

I am walking around my home seeing better than I have in years. But it mostly feels wasted as I watch my phone, panic, and wait to see what those in power will do – as I continue my comfortable existence of caring for my children, marking places on the wall for a light fixture, disturbed by my small personal anguishes, far away from a homeland I don’t remember.

Even so, in addition to writing, I choose to act – I attended last Saturday’s march for Palestine, which included the demand for no war on Iran. Now that the US has officially joined this war, it is imperative to keep resisting. The more of us outside the powerful who speak up, and continue to speak up, the more we – American, British, whoever we are, wherever we come from – can convince those in power to see better, to do better.

Sanam Mahloudji’s novel The Persians was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025, and is published by 4th Estate