Sahar Delijani in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
I am not writing this essay as an author, nor as an activist, nor as a representative of the Iranian people. I am writing this as the daughter of former dissidents who lost the best days of their lives in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. As the daughter of a woman who was forced to give birth behind bars, interrogated while going through labor. As the niece of a man executed on a summer morning alongside thousands of others, his body swallowed by an unmarked mass grave. As the granddaughter of working-class grandparents who endured endless humiliations and hardships to raise grandchildren whose parents languished in the regime’s houses of horror.
I am writing this as a woman who has carried the inheritance of violence, repression and state-sponsored terror all her life, as a little girl who learned early the discipline of silence, who knew what could never be said to strangers about where her parents had been and what had been done to them.
More here.
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