My homeland

.

We have slipped back forty‑four years, as if time were a trapdoor, into 1981—the year of the great slaughter. Over these decades, tens of thousands of Iranians have been arrested, tortured, and killed by the ruling power. The war against the homeland, that anti‑national war, belongs to another, darker chapter; let it rest aside for now. What grips the mind is this: why do people, for the thousandth time, err in choosing their leaders, rehearsing the same catastrophe again and again? Have we truly become prisoners of an endless orbit, condemned to circle the same dead star?#

Hands stretch toward the West, as if salvation could be subcontracted, as if a jester like Trump were anything but the return of an old wound in a cheaper mask. Facing them stands a regime long since unmasked, sparing neither child nor adult, reaching for chemical agents and live rounds against its own, cataloguing crimes faster than memory can keep up. Once more the marches bloom in streets across the world, once more the petitions, the hashtags, the fragile faith in media and every other thin instrument of visibility—will any of it puncture the armour, bend the script even slightly? The familiar depression after defeat waits in ambush, but something else has begun as well, something that will not easily go back into the bottle; a process is moving forward, slow and irreversible, and a people is learning, painfully, the shape of its own path.

For the hygiene of my feelings, I retreat into literature and art. This is how the soul is laundered and mended, page by page, image by image, until it remembers that it was not born merely to endure.

Hadi Khojinian

18 Jan 2026