Last night, I heard my father’s voice, not through a phone or a message, because those have been silent for over two months now. The internet blackout in Iran has taken even the smallest comforts from us, cutting through connection as if it were something expendable, something that could be removed without consequence. But in my dream, his voice returned as it always had warm, steady, familiar, and for a moment I was no longer distant from home, no longer separated by borders or silence. I was a little girl again, sitting beside him, listening as he read stories from the Shahnameh, the great Persian epic that shaped so many of our earliest understandings of the world.
For many Iranian children, the Shahnameh is not simply literature. It is memory before memory has a name, identity before identity has been questioned. Written over a thousand years ago by Ferdowsi, it carries within it the endurance of a people who have lived through conquest, loss, and reinvention, yet have never entirely surrendered their sense of justice. As a child, I did not understand the weight of those stories; I only understood the comfort of my father’s voice and the quiet certainty that good and evil could be recognized, that courage had meaning, that resistance was possible. It is only now, in exile, after years of distance from my homeland, that those stories have returned to me not as distant myths but as something far more immediate, far more unsettling, something that feels alive.
One story, more than any other, has remained with me: the story of Kaveh and Zahhak. Zahhak, the tyrant king, carried on his shoulders two serpents that demanded to be fed with the brains of young men. His survival depended on the destruction of the youth of his land, and so fear became the structure through which he ruled, violence the language through which he maintained order, and silence the condition he imposed upon those who remained. For years, I believed Zahhak belonged to a time that no longer existed, a symbol of cruelty exaggerated by imagination. But there comes a moment when myth begins to feel uncomfortably familiar, when the distance between story and reality begins to collapse.
Since January, I have stood in the streets of Dublin alongside other Iranians whose lives now exist between two worlds—physically present here, yet emotionally bound to a homeland that continues to call them back in ways that cannot be ignored. We gather not because it is easy, but because it is necessary, because there are voices inside Iran that cannot reach beyond its borders, and so those of us outside must carry what we can. We speak to politicians, we write, we organize, we insist that what is happening is not an abstract political issue but a human reality unfolding with consequences that cannot be undone. On the 8th and 9th of January, thousands of people were killed—ordinary people whose demands were neither radical nor complex. They asked for dignity, for freedom, for the right to exist without fear. Since then, more lives have been taken, often quietly, often without record, as if the absence of documentation could erase the reality of loss.
And it is here that Zahhak returns, not as myth, but as recognition. A system that sustains itself through the destruction of its youth reflects something deeper than politics; it reveals a pattern of power that has existed across time, one that we have already named, already understood, yet somehow continue to witness again. Like Zahhak, it feeds on the future of its own people in order to prolong its present. But the Shahnameh was never a story designed to end in despair, and this is perhaps why it has endured for so long. Within it, there is always a point at which fear loses its hold, at which silence becomes impossible to maintain.
Kaveh, the blacksmith, is not a king, not a figure of inherited power, but a man shaped by loss who refuses to accept it as inevitable. He stands before the tyrant and rejects the very structure that demands his obedience, raising his blacksmith’s apron as a banner and calling others to rise with him. And they do. Fereydoun, who follows, does not simply defeat Zahhak; he restores a sense of balance that had been lost, reminding those who remain that power is not permanent, that even the most entrenched systems can be undone. These stories have survived not because they belong to the past, but because they continue to describe the present whenever people reach the limits of what they can endure.
Today, Iranians are living their own Shahnameh. Young women and men stand unarmed in the face of violence, not because they do not feel fear, but because fear no longer guarantees their silence. Families grieve without the space to mourn publicly, carrying their losses in private while the world continues to move around them. Communication is cut, voices are suppressed, yet somehow the call for freedom extends beyond borders, carried by those who refuse to let it disappear. There is a quiet understanding among Iranians, whether inside the country or scattered across the world, that this moment is not isolated, it belongs to a longer story, one that has been told before, one that is being told again.
And so I find myself here, in Ireland, far from the land that shaped me, yet unable to feel truly distant from it. Because last night, in a dream, my father’s voice returned, and with it came a clarity that is difficult to ignore. Through him, I remembered not only where I come from, but what it means to carry that history forward. I am the daughter of a land that has told stories of resistance for over a thousand years, the child who once listened without understanding, and now the voice that speaks because silence is no longer possible.
These are no longer stories we inherit passively. They are truths we are living through. And they must be told, not as myths belonging to another time, but as realities unfolding in our own.
This is only the beginning.
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