In search of flowers, I spent a day in early March visiting plant shops and market stalls in central Malmö, Sweden. I was looking for something in particular. Laleh ye vajigunupside down tulip. A reddish mountain flower that grows in Zagros, the ancestral land of Bakhtiari. It is a flower of sadness and mourning.
I didn’t realize that I had spent most of the day on this makeshift mission until I was sitting on a bench in Sodra Forstadsgatan and felt a pulsing pain in my leg. I wasn’t dressed for the weather. This wasn’t the plan. I only intended to go out for a second, but here I am, almost four hours later. I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m in a faraway country, watching in horror as my country is relentlessly bombed. Maybe that’s why I was so particular about this flower. as if it were me doing something.
However, March in Sweden is not a season. In the end, I settled on regular red tulips. Defeated, I met a small group of Iranians on my way back to my apartment, which had been cleaned diligently. It could be seen from a distance that they wore the lion and sun flag, which had become the banner of monarchist fervor. One of the people in the group, a man in his early 30s, noticed me and asked if I wanted to go with him. I shook my head. In the run-up to the war, the diaspora was divided, with loud monarchist groups rallying behind the bombing campaign, brandishing “Make Iran Great Again” placards and waving flags. Ancien Régime Alongside the American and Israeli flags. They can be seen dancing in the streets as people are massacred and Iran’s schools, hospitals and cultural buildings are reduced to rubble.
But no, it’s wrong to call this ” break;The outbreak of war exposed and exacerbated existing fault lines. For years, you’ve ignored your cousin’s exiled nationalism and empire nostalgia in order to keep the peace in your group chat. And when your friends started ventriloquizing people getting cut to death in the streets in January, you couldn’t hold your tongue. You said there are no voiceless people, only those who are silenced or ignored, and that sovereignty rests with the people, not the king. you have been accused Iranian blood on my hands for the effort.
I’m playing half-heartedly taro Game: He keeps insisting that I join him, but I keep refusing, explaining that I’m tired. I didn’t have the heart for yet another discussion about kings and sovereignty and speaking on behalf of others. and I It was It’s true that I’m exhausted, but it’s not because I’ve been walking across the city all day. Rather, it was the cumulative effect of not sleeping or eating much during the day and night that was taking its toll. I was glued to my computer screen, staring at undelivered messages on my phone. I was looking for an upside down tulip, but I will tell you that it turned out to be a regular tulip. why? In memory of at least 175 peopleNearly all of the children were killed in the American bombing of Shajare Tayebeh Primary School in Minab. A middle-aged woman standing next to me interjected. she asks. which side I’m on. I exhale and say I am on the side of the children. “What happens to the children the regime has killed?” Before I could reply, she snatched the flowers from my hand and threw them on the street. “It’s time to celebrate,” she says, bouncing on her shoulders to imaginary music. A man who appeared to be her husband shyly pushed her away and she kept asking him what he thought he was doing.
I shared this incident with others and was left speechless myself. I struggle to explain my reaction, or lack thereof, and reach for words that seem contradictory in the moment. “Something happened.” violent We talk about encounters, but there’s something obscene about talking about the violence of throwing flowers during a war. How do we explain the abyss that separates celebration from mourning?
A few days later, at a cafe in Meran, a friend visiting from London asked me why I was looking for upside-down tulips, and I explained Bakhtiari customs while showing him a photo of a kuran on my phone. Here is a snapshot of the history of the place where I was born. He had never heard of Bakhtiari before. I don’t blame him. I explain that as part of his modernization project, the then ruler Reza Shah oppressed the Bakhtiari people in various ways, particularly because their ancestral lands were home to a burgeoning oil industry, the profits of which were siphoned off to British banks. But the Bakhtiari tribe was not the only target. To build the modern Iranian state, Reza Shah promoted a single language, a single history, and a single identity. Systematic targeting of diverse populations was not an afterthought, but a cornerstone of this project.
A British acquaintance of mine said I didn’t answer that question. Who is Bakhtiari?Perhaps this constitutional lawyer was looking for something neat and categorizable.? The simple answer is: We are the indigenous people of the Zagros Mountains. Southwest Iran. He didn’t know it at the time, but he soon realized he wasn’t asking an innocent question.
“A people without history, without literature, without even tradition, exhibits phenomena that put science to shame,” wrote George Nathanial Curzon, a Bakhtiari British politician, in his 1892 book. Persia and the Persian Problem. Lord Curzon, who later became Viceroy of India, traveled throughout the region asserting Iran’s strategic importance as part of the Great Game against Russia. Henry Creswick Rawlinson, a British army officer and agent for the British East India Company, described Bakhtiari as “the most skilful and notorious bandit” and “the most savage and savage of all the inhabitants of Persia.”
There are two other people in the cafe. We are two young academics from Copenhagen who crossed the Ålesund Bridge for this conference that we had planned several months ago. We were scheduled to discuss a joint seminar series on decolonial legality. Given the nature of our conference, I thought my short historical interlude would generate some interest and perhaps some follow-up questions. Instead, my colleague just gave me a few nods about my efforts to scour the archives for the book I’m writing. One of them suggests that it now looks like this: bad times doing this kind of research. The current neocolonial strategy toward Iran, led by the United States and Israel, appears to be, in part, about dividing the country, supporting separatists even with weapons as a means of promoting sectarianism. Khuzestan is of central importance in this effort given its natural resources. Therefore, given strategic objectives, it is best to remain silent about Bakhtiari, at least for now. It amazes me that there always seems to be a reason for making Indigenous people invisible.
Trying to break the ice with a half-hearted joke, one of the Danes said he didn’t want me to be mistaken for an American secret agent. Writing about Bakhtiari is clearly akin to working for the CIA. Twice in one week I’ve been accused of something like that. The first time I was accused of being an agent of the Islamic Republic because I denounced an illegal war, it wasn’t a joke, or at least it wasn’t.
Caught between Iranian monarchists and Western anti-imperialists, I closed the door and drew the curtains. However, I do keep notifications on my phone in case the internet outage ends. I end up having to be awake 24/7 because messages come flooding in from everywhere except where I want to hear them. Every vibration gives false hope. I received such a message from an Inuit actor I met at the Suiala Arts Festival. Before I open it, I remember the innocent question she asked that week. About Ruri, about Bakhtiari customs and rituals, and about the reality of evacuation. Her message is a captionless photo of a bucket of red paint, and we both know what that means. Last October, when we were talking about the Hans Egede statue in Nuuk, I felt the urge to desecrate it, but obviously I didn’t because it wasn’t desecrating my statue. The next day, she sent an audio memo musing about how European nations had rushed to defend Denmark’s sovereignty over Karaalit Nunaat in the midst of the American threat, and how she was expected to choose between masters.
After a week of sleepless nights, a new WhatsApp message breaks the mental fog. This is from my sister in New York. My 4-year-old niece asked if her house would be bombed. She has no sense of territory. She heard adults in the kitchen talking about a school being blown up, but she couldn’t understand that it was in another country on the other side of the world. That doesn’t matter. To a 4-year-old, school is school, kids are kids, and bombs are bombs. What should I say to a girl who has such anxiety? No, you’re not going to get killed.. I thought about saying something else, but then decided against it because it wouldn’t be true. was about to say no one wants to kill you.
This article was first published public seminar Published on April 13, 2026.
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
