When Bombs Fall
Saying Yes to Life
poupeh Missaghi
0On June 13th, 2025, Israel attacks Iran. The first attacks come in the middle of the night Tehran time. The attacks continue intensively for twelve days. The attacks kill hundreds. The attacks injure thousands. Some military officers, some nuclear scientists. Mostly civilians.
Israel calls the attacks targeted, justified. Despite years of conflict and various forms of confrontation between Israel and Iran —mainly indirect up to this 13th day of June, 2025—the attacks still come as a surprise. War is always a surprise, its impacts always unbelievable, even if you have been fearing it and, as such, also expecting it, all your life.
1This morning (on June 26th, 2025, thirteen days after the start of the war, two days into the ceasefire), I wake up around five a.m. Denver time, startled and perplexed. I wake up as if from a nightmare, but I remember the dream I had being actually pleasant and peaceful. I was teaching a class in Iran, though within the frame of the scene there was a strange piece of fabric, red, flesh-like or like the texture of mushrooms, elongated from one corner of a roof to another corner of the floor, as if a weaving practice was in session. I wake up not remembering the dream or swimming in its images; those come later. Rather, I wake up with a never-before-experienced sensation in my body. Inside my chest, inside my belly, bombs are exploding. Not like I am remembering or imagining bombs, and consequently I am feeling the explosions somatically. No. I am split in two, and one part of me is watching me from above me, is outside my body and the other part is a landscape of muscles and veins in which the bombs are exploding. One after another… One after another…
Yasmin El-Rifae starts her essay “To Know What They Know, On Misapprehending Palestinian Children,” by discussing what it meant to see images of Israel’s genocide of Palestinian children from a geographical distance, on her device. She notes, “I am writing to move past the paralysis brought about by so many images of pain.” Later, she adds, “The only reasonable response to these images [. . .] is shock and rage. [. . . .] [S]ome of this rage will get deflected laterally, or inwardly, will paralyze or obstruct our thought, our ability to function.”
2
This morning (on June 22nd, 2025, nine days into the war), I am meeting online with students from my “Iranians Writing in English” group. For many months we have gathered—from cities in Iran, Europe, and the US—to talk about language, reading, and writing, in all the shapes and forms that are demanded of us, discussions through which many similar themes and sensibilities (including displacement, sex, death, memory, trauma, and limitations of expression) as well as unique voices and characteristics have revealed themselves. I have been fascinated by how shared geopolitical events and collective experiences translate into individual stories/histories. But today, we are not meeting as a class, but as friends dispersed around the globe. We check in on each other, on our parents, trying to analyze this new war, to understand what is happening—not just around us, but also within us—and to predict what awaits us.
At some point during our togetherness, I ask them if they are writing. I know at least one, an old-time friend living in Iran who had left Tehran for the nearby town of Qazvin a few days ago only to return to Tehran the day before our call has been writing, because he has posted some notes on his social media. After some discussion, he asks me the same question in return. I speak about the feeling that I should not because I am far away, because I am experiencing the war from a distance, through the mediation and fragmentation of social media posts and biased media coverage, because I am not in the middle of it, my body not endangered no matter how much I am in the depths of it psychologically. But he reminds me, reminds all of us who are away from Iran, that we too are experiencing and are in the midst of it, simply from a different positionality.
It is a good reminder and true, but this doesn’t change the feeling of guilt and the shame of being so far away and safe. This one country of mine is actually supporting (and will soon be directly involved in) the bombardment of my other country, my home country, by the genocidal regime that has robbed and continues to rob land and life from many Palestinians. This feeling of guilt sometimes borders on hatred of the self and the others in this geographical location, when outside my window the only sounds I can hear are of neighbors walking their dogs and greeting each other and commenting on the weather and the beauty of the sky and the vegetable beds, of kids playing basketball with no worry or awareness in their bodies while bodies of other kids beyond the borders of the US are targeted, all with no justification other than greed and power and the mere pointlessness of war and the infinity of the desire of the destruction of the other. The hard thing about feeling survivor’s guilt is that you even feel ashamed to voice the guilt you are feeling.
3
In his essay “On Representations of Evil”, Donald Moss talks about the fragility of the space between self-defense and the elimination of the other, about the desire to erase whatever disturbs not only one’s life but also one’s pleasure. Describing his experience visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, Moss writes, “There are cries here that I must hear. I am linked by race to the perpetrators, by feeling to the lynched, and by position to the witnesses. I will be surrounded by cries, from inside and out.” It is this floating multi-layered framework of positionality that gives me some grounding these days. Crying from inside and out, I must acknowledge that my link can never be with just one side of the story, no matter how much I would desire it to be, but rather it is complex and multifaceted. I am, through my Iranianness, linked to the victims of Israel’s war on Iran, to the wounds of its land, while through my Americanness linked to the war’s perpetrators and supporters. I am, through both my Iranianness and my Americanness, linked to two governments that have harmed the Palestinian cause each for its own agendas. I am, through my feelings and actions, linked to those who aim to stand against injustice in Iran and the US and anywhere in the world, but also to bystanders, because no matter what we do, we fail to act against all injustices in a meaningful way. I am, through my position as writer and translator, also linked to the witnesses documenting our time, wherever we can, however we can. And this list of linkages keeps unfurling.
We are all, simultaneously linked to the oppressors, the oppressed, the bystanders, the witnesses, linked to the visible and the invisible crowds around. It is only through acknowledging these links that we can rise from a sense of helplessness and move toward a sense of responsibility and action as part of the larger march of history.
4
The first attacks on Iran by Israel happen on the early evening of Thursday June 12th in Colorado, where I am, which is the early morning of June 13th in Iran. Many locations are targeted simultaneously, and many civilians are killed in their sleep (a friend who I was texting with earlier that night woke up to the explosions and to my terrified texts to check on them wrote, “We went to sleep and woke up in the middle of a war!” His words break my heart as heavily as some of those explosions).
Soon after the end of the war, a description of time—“a twelve-day war”—becomes a proper noun—“The Twelve-Day War—first for American politicians and then picked by all media, perhaps to underline a beginning and an end, indicate a victory over a short period of time. The name has terrifying echoes of the names of other wars in the region in my ears: the Six-Day War of 1967 between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan; and the 34-Day War in 2006 between Israel and Lebanon. It makes me wonder what implications of these numbers and durations I have been unaware of.
The fact that the war starts on a Thursday evening in my time zone means that I will not have my next analytic session until the following Monday. (My weekly four sessions are set between Monday-Thursday, currently at seven-thirty in the morning my time, five p.m. my analyst’s time. M. M., my analyst, is based in Tehran; our sessions have continued for twelve years in various formats.) However, on the morning of Friday June 13th in Colorado, I still wake up to an alarm I have mistakenly set for an analysis session I do not have. A bit later that morning, I text my analyst because I cannot not check in to make sure he and his loved ones are safe. They are, he writes. We continue to text back and forth, about displacement, death, endurance, and survival (or I rather say “survivance,” a beautiful term coined by Anishinaabe (Chippewa) scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor who believes “survival” bounds communities in the past while “survivance” reflects their active agency and continuation into the future), about one’s land being a container of its lives and deaths. Later that day, I send him a picture I have taken on Naropa University’s campus in Boulder, where I am for the week, as part of their Summer Writing Program, teaching a course focused on human evil and human resistance to evil, using a psychological lens.
The picture is of one of two trees, said to be more than a century old, older than the city itself, behind which the caption under a wall painting reads “Rise.” My analyst sends me in response a picture of another tree he has taken some time ago, a tree known as Sarv-e Abar Kuh, a five-thousand-five-hundred-year-old cypress tree in the city of Abarkuh in Iran, said to have been planted by Zarathustra. All day, I think about all the lives and deaths the trees have witnessed, the stories they carry of we humans and nonhumans within their bodies, about how genocide and ecocide go hand in hand.
The next day, the afternoon of June 14th my time (June 15th, 12:11 Tehran Time), my analyst shares a story on his Instagram, a video from his rooftop of one of the biggest explosions to date near Tehran. I message him with concern, ask him to please go down to the basement and stay safe. He writes back that he is headed downstairs. On Monday June 17th, we have our usual audio session. I don’t remember what I say, how it goes. I only remember that before the session, I felt it would be nice to have a video session, but without me saying a word of that wish, he, at the end the session, suggests that we have a video session the next day, something we have not done for a long while, and we do that. I don’t remember what we say during that next session either. I only remember crying a lot, partly from the joy of seeing him, a body safe in the analysis space I had walked into many many times years ago.
And then in a few hours’ time, the internet in Iran gets shut down, first for some areas and then entirely. So, when I wake up the next morning, on June 18, ready for my session, I have no way of contacting him; none of the several usual routes of connection work, not even the calling cards. The few minutes after the start time of my session pass like hours. Until he calls me directly on his cellphone (not a cheap or ideal method), and for the next few sessions, we do analysis on the phone until the internet starts working again in Iran.
“My analyst then addresses me in a tone very different from his usual one and makes a vow to me. He commits to me that he will do everything he can in his power to be there for my mother if the need arises, go check on her anytime I want him to.”
In one of those phone sessions, when I am talking about losing my mind over the safety of my mother in Tehran and my fears about my inability to reach her, he pauses—it is strange that I hear this pause differently than the usual silence of him listening to me. My analyst then addresses me in a tone very different from his usual one and makes a vow to me. He commits to me that he will do everything he can in his power to be there for my mother if the need arises, go check on her anytime I want him to. He notes that he has never made such a commitment but that he means it and I should not worry. My tears begin to shed in a way they have not since the beginning of this unbelievable ordeal, as if only then the pain inside my chest has found its way out to the surface.
Many of our sessions during these twelve days become conversations about the war, about politics and news, what is covered and not covered, alliances and enmities, factions and fractions, attempts to situate ourselves in the moment, in ourselves and the external world. I can’t tell, or don’t really care, if these sessions would fall under conventional guidelines of psychoanalysis, but what I know is that, under the inhumane conditions of those war days, they helped save me, and along with me our relationship not just as analyst-analysand but as human beings grounded in time and space while separated by thousands of miles. It's only several sessions after M.’s vow, during the ceasefire, that I confess to him that even if my mother were here in the US safe with me or my brother, the pain of those days of war would still be unbearable. I would still be as worried: about him, about my friends, about relations who are more important and meaningful to my life than any family; also about the land itself, all the buildings and streets and trees and the air and the smells and the graveyards that continue to carry memories of our lives and deaths, the possibilities of our future. The image that comes to me in this session is of me opening my arms and reaching across the globe to hold a map of Iran in the safety of my embrace, an image that makes me frightened of the very desire aroused within me to have such godly power, to want to be omnipresent and omnipotent, wishing to save my land through one embrace, thus also alleviating my own grief, only to have to sit with the limitations of my humanness, the pains of failing.
5
In her book The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity: A Psychoanalytic Approach, Christina Wieland, whom I have been reading for a while now, delves into the fascist state of mind to examine what is at the root of fascist political regimes, a framework I find quite useful in my work on state violence and the role of ordinary citizens in the perpetuation of such violence. Wieland refers to two points made by Christopher Bollas: “that the fascist state of mind is common to all of us; and that it is a state of mind that leads to genocide.” The way she discusses this further has helped me overcome my shock at the continuation and aggravation—despite the protests—of what is happening primarily in Gaza, but also in the US, in Iran, and many other parts of the world. Wieland explains that the fascist state of mind aims for “coherence and the elimination of difference and plurality,” a condition that leads to “a moral void.” The fascist subject then looks to “find a victim,” to contain the void,” transforming “a human other into a disposable entity,” whose annihilation is not only possible but also desirable and necessary. For the “unperson” (a term used by Joachim Fest to describe Hitler) that leaders of totalitarian states become, “[t]he only ‘real’ object is the will to power,” a desire to be omnipotent, and perhaps an illusion that they are. Like nothing can ever stop these leaders, like not even death will ever bring them to their knees.
6
The evening of June 12th, I am supposed to do a reading for the Summer Writing Program students and faculty at Naropa. I initially decide to create a collage of various texts of mine—interweaving commentary on US torture practices, the US presidential election, and the US support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—and to add some new writing I plan to do in a pocket of free time I have before the event about some mushroom visions I had back in April.
We Iranians celebrate our new year on the exact moment of the spring equinox and, to mark the end of our thirteen-day Nowruz celebrations, we head to nature. So, this year, a friend and I rent a cabin in the mountains of Colorado for the occasion of the 13th day of Farvardin (April 3rd, 2025). Outside the window of the cabin, beyond the vortex of a valley, a rugged grayish brown mountain sits very close to us, looking over and inside at us. (I send a picture of this mountain to my analyst because he is originally from Kermanshah, a town sitting at the foot of similar mountains in the Zagros Mountain Range.) While we are sipping the mushroom-brewed tea, to usher us into the experience, I play a solo setar performance by Iranian composer and musician Kayhan Kalhor, performed during Covid, to no audience, in a hall of mirrors at Tehran’s Abgineh Museum, a performance that repeats itself, through the algorithms of YouTube, at the very end of that several-hours-long trip, marking the completion of a circle. Kalhor’s music, as I told my friend the poet Joey Yearous-Algozin in a letter many months ago, sounds to me like a manifestation of my soul outside of my body, as if someone has given voice to my psyche, to the silent sounds of my breaths; so it feels special to have him and his music here to accompany me in and out of this experience.
While sitting on the couch, looking outside at the mountain, I begin to enter my first vision. In it, I am a woman, a young woman, a younger version of myself. I am sitting on the ground in a landscape of ruins. A city destroyed. As far as the eye can see. All that remains are ruins and gray destruction. I am sitting on the ground, in the midst of all this, this weight of the debris, and I begin to give birth. My legs spread open, I reach into my body with my own two hands. The ashes around me seem like a sea surrounding me in the weight of a fluid burial landscape. From inside my vagina, I pull out what I am giving birth to. Body parts. A limb. A limb. A leg. A foot. Baby parts, but never a baby. Until… then, there is a baby. I pull out the baby and the baby is silent, is not crying, and the baby is not whole, has a hole, a giant hole, in the place where their heart should have been, where their lungs should have breathed in, breathed out, breathed in, breathed….
After a while, I begin to enter the second vision, and the landscape terrifies me so much so that I ask my friend to sit with me and hold me, doubting that I can make the passage all by myself. In this second vision, I am once again a woman, but this time a woman of my own age. I am sitting in the middle of a cemetery, surrounded by tombstones as far as the eye can see. So much concrete around me. So much grayness. The tombstones are lying on the ground, the way they mostly do on the other side of the world, not erect and demanding attention the way they mostly do on this side of the world. Lying on the ground as if the dead are disappearing, becoming one with the earth embracing them. I am sitting on the ground, covered in a black veil, turning gray from the dust or, as we say in Persian, with "the dust of death." The veil has already slipped down my shoulders, spreading on the ground around me, turning my body into a different kind of creature, not with legs and feet on the ground, but with a floating fabric already dissolving into the debris around it. I am looking up into the sky, staring into the void overlooking me, and I begin to moan, letting out the wail of mothers bearing the corpses of their children in their hearts, crying my heart out, and the skies begin to turn darker and darker.
The third vision arrives sometime later, and by now, my body feels deeply fatigued with what feels like the weight of a history that is mine but not just mine, belonging to an invisible community that has forever surrounded me. In vision three, I am an old woman, a much older version of myself. I am sitting on the ground, in the same landscape as the first vision, debris and ashes as far as the eye can see. I am here all by myself, the way I was in the other two visions, all alone, as if stranded, or rather as if I have made the choice, or the choice has been made for me, to stay here, in this land already ruined, in this memorial to the violence inflicted. I am sitting in a strange position, as if my body is misshapen, or maybe just my legs. Then I reach out. Once again inside my body. Not into my vagina this time, but into my chest. And from the left side of my chest, I begin to pull out my ribs. One rib at a time. Slowly. Pulling out the ribs that are a shield to the heart. Pulling them out, one by one, and holding them up, one by one, as if offering them to the skies, overshadowed and burdened, heavy and weighted, not like the earth around but, in their own way, as if bruised from a breath held back. One by one, I arrange my pulled-out ribs around me, as if feathers with a voice, on the earth, ashen and in tears, in the form of a circle. A skirt of bones. A body in ruins, at the center, still breathing, in mourning.
The night I have these visions in April, I am primarily thinking about Palestine because the colors of the visions remind me of photographs and videos from Gaza—the debris, the ashes, the gray of destruction—but I also think about the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, the longest conventional war of the 20th century, during my childhood years in Iran. I am reminded of the images we watched broadcast on state TV of the war zones in the southwest of Iran, of the sounds of sirens and close-by bomb explosions once they reached the capital, Tehran, where we lived, and of the seemingly infinite expanse dedicated to the tombs of the war martyrs in Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery. A historical event in the past, its effects still continue in my body. In April of 2024, during the previous direct confrontations between Israel and Iran, every breaking news and sounds of sirens on my phone would send my body into shock, a disbelief and fear that would immediately translate to my covering my ears, pacing around and crying uncontrollably.
The afternoon of June 12th, when I finish writing my visions down, I continue to think about the same associations, but they soon begin to change forever because of what the warmongers bring upon us anew only a few hours later. Left with some time before the event, as I sit waiting around, scrolling social media and texting with a friend, Israel attacks my hometown of Tehran. Today I go back to the time stamps of those text messages. The first messages are sent around five-thirty p.m. MT, three in the morning Tehran time, and we are just chatting, sharing updates about life. Then at six-thirty p.m., I have sent a chain of terrified messages back to my friend to see if he is awake, if they are ok, which means between the two sets of messages, I have read the news of the attack. Reading that news, I don’t even dare text or call my mother, not wanting to wake her up if she hasn’t already woken, so instead I look over every possible news outlet to make sure the explosions have not been in her neighborhood. My friend and I continue to text until I have to leave for my reading. I wonder out loud what I should read. He suggests I read our text messages. And then he also sends me screen shots from messages from another group of his friends that have started to come in.
Walking up the stage in my crutches (I have recently seriously injured my ankle while moving out of my apartment and have been mainly immobile), I suddenly think about how this feeling of homelessness and helplessness I have been carrying particularly in the past few weeks within me now feels like a premonition, a literal translation in my body of this experience of war from a distance. As I stand there and begin to read my prepared collaged text, I also begin to understand the visions I have written anew, as if messages from another realm, as if my psyche or my imagination had lived this reality before, or as if time is circular and the future was already the past was already the present continuous. After reading the visions, I move on to reading the messages exchanged only minutes ago between my friend and their friends in Tehran, translating them on the spot, anonymously, as I, crying, scroll down further and further, until I hit my time mark for the reading.
7
In his book Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti has a section dedicated to “Invisible Crowds.” Under that category, he writes about “the conception of the invisible dead” and notes that “it is tempting to call it humanity’s oldest conception.” Canetti writes, “[T]he action of the dead upon the living has been an essential part of life itself. They were thought of as being together [. . .] and generally it was assumed that there were a great many of them.” He proposes that one can classify religions based on “the way in which they manipulate their invisible crowds,” which, besides the dead, also include devils or saints, and “are imagined as large, concentrated hosts.” He adds elsewhere that the invisible crowds are our “life-blood” and “the hopes and desires of men cling to them. When they fade, faith weakens and, whilst it dies slowly away, fresh hosts come to take the place of the faded.” In this sense, I suggest we can replace “religions” with any form of human collectivity, because it seems that all groups rely, in one way or another, on the achievements and failures of those who came before them as well as the projected wishes for those who will come after them in order to define and build their present moments. Using the narratives of the invisible crowds before and after them, groups promote what new narratives they themselves want to deliver to shape their lives.
These days more than ever I think about this invisible crowd. What have we inherited from them, what do we pass on to them.
8
The day the war starts in Tehran also marks the third anniversary of my father’s passing in Tehran, whom I had not seen since 2019 and whose funeral I was not able to attend because, after the publication of my first book, I have not considered it safe to go back home to Iran due to the political nature of my work. The 23rd of Khordad / 13th of June this year falls on a Friday, which is traditionally considered by Iranians the day of remembering the dead, the day of the week they visit cemeteries. On Friday, my mom is supposed to go to the cemetery to visit my dad’s grave and call me so I can accompany her via Facetime, but that visit has not happened yet due to the uncertainties of war conditions.
One thing that keeps coming up in my analysis these days is how the guilt and shame I feel with regard to the war and being distant from Iran and my people, those I know and do not know personally, cannot be separated from the feelings I have about not traveling to see my father, about choosing language and writing and witnessing over the ability to walk into my parents’ apartment and embrace them in flesh and blood, about not being able to be there and let my father’s body rest in the soil of the land that has given me life and many relations and many memories, where I have learned and failed to learn many lessons of what it means to be part of a community, where my roots will remain forever, where today foreign genocidal forces, hand-in-hand with the totalitarian forces inside, are set to eliminate/annihilate its life forces.
9
In another letter to Joey, from back in October 2024, I write, “the images of the bodies, the body pieces, the remains of tissues, they do not disappear, the sound of those surviving rushing to help. . . the gray of the debris covering everything, the green turned into rubble. . . I don’t know how Palestinians in this country are making it from day to day. . . I can’t imagine how I could do it if something similar happened to my land and my people. . . At every event and protest I see Palestinians I am in awe of their strength, their resolve, their resistance, the force of their life. . .” Then I continue to invite the company of John Berger, writing of his advocacy for Palestine throughout his life and his use of the term “undefeated despair” which I first came upon in his book Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. I have kept coming back to this term since I read it years ago as a way to ground myself, but over the past few weeks more than ever I keep asking myself how Palestinians hold on to their breath and their undefeated despair against powers that have all the money and weapons behind their forces of death and destruction.
10
On June 17th (the fourth day of war), Iranian sociologist and prisoner of conscience Zia Nabavi, from whose perspective I have over the years learned so much shared a post on Instagram entitled “In Praise of a Politics of Saying Yes to Life.” A devout advocate of prisoners’ right to education, he was in his last round of imprisonment sentenced for speaking out against the mysterious mass poisonings of girls’ schools in Iran in 2022. Zia was at the time of writing the post out on bail but has since been summoned back to prison. In section five of his post, he writes (in Persian, translated by me):
“‘Saying yes to life’ I believe is the best yardstick to differentiate, to some extent, between progressive movements and policies and their reactionary counterparts.”
“‘Saying yes to life’ I believe is the best yardstick to differentiate, to some extent, between progressive movements and policies and their reactionary counterparts. Progressive and liberatory politics need to make affirmative connections with possibilities for life, leading to richer and more equal approaches to life. Basically, any politics that has its foundations in fighting an Other or hatred toward an external enemy (whether its objects of hate are leaders of Iran or Israel or else…), justifying itself with whatever theoretical discourse (whether nationalism, liberalism, socialism, feminism, etc.), depreciates possibilities for life in this land. If, amid this horrifying tragedy, we are to take sides, we better choose the side of life and not fear how, as a result of this choice, we will be judged or categorized according to existing life-denying discourses […] We are in need of a redefinition of the concept of resistance and courage that is not afraid to say yes to life even under the bombardment of an aggressor regime, under the oppression of an authoritarian regime, or under the judging eyes of social media. Perhaps in this way we could hold on to the hopes of connecting a rich and happy personal life with an impactful righteous collective life.”
11
What else is left to say other than that in a world where human life is less valued than ever before, on so many levels and through so many forms of violence, perhaps the strongest form of resistance against war and annihilation is through the art of living by holding on to the dignity of the breath of life, human and nonhuman, individual and collective.