December 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Staring at a Digital Black Hole By Amir Ahmadi Arian Tehran skyline On the morning of November 16, 2019, we, the exiled Iranians, woke up and like billions of other internet addicts in the world immediately checked our phones, only to realize that Iran had been cut off from the global internet. Many of us are members of family group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram, used to receiving a “good morning to my children” from a parent, a “did you finally go to the doctor?” from the other parent, a picture of the overdue first snow in Tehran from an aunt, and a joke about the president from an uncle. Over the years, these short messages have served as daily reminders of where we come from and who our people are. Above all, they have been our daily reassurance that our families were fine. The internet had functioned as the umbilical cord that kept alive the part of our soul still dependent on the motherland. That morning, the cord was cut. * The internet blackout, we learned, was the Iranian government’s response to the protests that broke out after it announced a 300 percent increase in the price of gas. The decision was made and implemented at midnight, with no advance warning given. Thanks to the state of Iran under sanctions, the news of the price hike was like a lit match in a barrel of dynamite. Protests spread very wide, very fast. The protesters moved beyond the gas price issue to target the entire status quo. The Iranian government let loose its police and militia. The crisis became so deep and so serious, the bloodshed so vast and the heap of corpses so high, that the government cut off the internet to keep people from organizing and to stifle the distribution of videos of its brutality, which included numerous instances of indiscriminate shooting at unarmed protesters. For us, the Iranians abroad, desperate and in the dark, the savagery was nothing new. Everyone who has paid attention to Iran, a country beleaguered by ruthlessness of sanctions and brutalized by its own vicious, paranoid government, expected an explosion of violence. But the internet blackout came out of nowhere. None of us had ever thought that one day Iran would become a digital black hole, a dark void on the blindingly glittering map of the global network. We found ourselves locked out of the house whose windows, we had thought, we would always be able to look through. Read More
October 17, 2019 One Word One Word: Avareh By Amir Ahmadi Arian I have lived outside Iran, my home country, for almost a decade, and I am yet to know what to call myself. Australia and the U.S. have been my hosts, so the labels I have at my disposal belong to the English vocabulary: immigrant, exilé, refugee, expatriate. The term “immigrant” derives from the Latin root migrare, which means “to change residence or condition.” In its contemporary usage it refers to someone who has left one nation or territory in order to take residence in another. Exilé, from exul, or “banished person,” is a term for those banished from their native country or community. Refugee, a compound of re and fugere, to flee, describes a person, often violently displaced, seeking shelter outside of their country of origin. Expatriate, literally out (ex-) of the native land (patria), suggests a willing abandonment of one’s homeland. All these terms have one thing in common: an intrinsic connection to the state. You have immigrant or refugee status only when a state grants it, as though proffering a token of its magnanimity. They also imply that change of status is synonymous with change of nation-state, and takes place only when an established geopolitical border is crossed. So every time one is called an immigrant, a refugee, an exilé, one is thrown into a nexus of power at the center of which the state looms large. No wonder that, if you are not qualified for any of those labels, in English you are called “stateless.” Also, it is no coincidence that, unlike most English words that have French and Danish and Old English roots, these terms all come from Latin, the language of the Roman empire, probably the first powerful state that excelled at the cruel art of systematic, state-sponsored xenophobia. In English, the most technically correct description for me is immigrant. I got a visa stamped into my passport, boarded a gigantic Boeing 707, and crossed the ocean to New York City, where I now live and work. But the word doesn’t fit right. It is not capacious enough for what I see as the scope of my experience. I feel the same way about these other terms for people whose movement from one place to another is a central feature of who they are. For a long time I thought it was my obsessive, sometimes pointlessly defiant mind at work, rejecting the characterizations most people accept without a fuss. But it has dawned on me recently that maybe my obstinacy has a point. Maybe something is wrong with this available vocabulary. Maybe English, the ultimate language of colonial settlers, can’t conceive of a word that could capture what people like me experience. So I went back to Persian, the other language I know, to see if that old tongue of fallen empires and sublime poets had a better name for me. Read More