Five Writers, One Massacre, and a Language That Fails Them

Five Iranian writers have published a collective account of the January 2026 massacre in Iran and the internet blackout that followed, written — against their own doubts — in English, the language none of them grew up speaking. The texts, published as notes written "in the immediate aftermath" and presented "as is," come from poupeh missaghi (USA/France), Moeen Farrokhi (Tehran), Neshat Sadatmansoori (USA), Pooneh Yekta (Germany) and A.T. Pouladi (Iran), members of an online workshop for Iranians who write in English instead of Persian.

The project began innocently. Around a year earlier, missaghi started facilitating the class — two members in Iran, one in Germany, two in the US — which moved through writing prompts, workshops and readings of diaspora literature. The group had recently decided to write a collaborative text about their shared experience of writing outside their mother tongue. Then the January protests and the crackdown intervened.

What do the numbers say?

The texts circle one figure: 12,000 killed, "and many more disappeared or arrested," repeated across news media as the blackout eased. Sadatmansoori, writing from Denver, records the instability of the count — "Ten thousand. Thirteen thousand. Fifteen thousand bodies." She tries to grasp it through scale: a full stadium's worth of seats, "almost the entire population of a mid-sized campus." Her body, she writes, "reacts not to an event, but to its magnitude."

Farrokhi, writing from inside Tehran during the blackout, reports secondhand accounts: armed forces who "shot at people aimlessly, but with enough precision to ensure that the bullets would hit someone"; pellet rounds ("saachme," a word he cannot translate without internet access) hitting a man one centimeter above his eye, blinding others outright; bodies cleared from the streets by morning. He walks the foggy streets at night among unidentifiable figures in black, targeted by green lasers from motorcyclists he cannot see. "There are no words to utter," he writes, "only the emerging continuous nonverbal sounds of the survivors — mourning."

Yekta, in Germany, relays her mother's account of January 9: regime forces shooting young protesters, two of them dying in a family's parking garage, and a stranger then having to find the dead teenagers' parents by phone and hand over their children's bodies. Her response is to question language itself: "Writing about trauma in a second language feels like running after a mirage."

Why write in English at all?

Each writer answers differently, and the divergence is the piece's engine. Missaghi describes losing her connection to English as the 12,000 figure circulated: "It is rather the language of a land choosing to be ambivalent to this pain, or worse, choosing to cannily manipulate it." She writes anyway — not to resist or witness, she says, but to "stay together, as humans of the mind and the body" with her four collaborators.

Sadatmansoori frames English as "a violence" of archiving that dissolves "its voice, its whispers... like flesh in acid," yet keeps writing because "to remain alive is to leave some trace before it disappears." Yekta reconsiders her second language as less a shield than a method: because perfect articulation "can never arrive, I can't be fully harmed — or at least, I can stay with my body, remember, and remain."

Pouladi pushes back hardest, questioning Sadatmansoori's ascription of violence to English and critiquing "an incapacitated Left, unable to encounter Iran and its history of social movements except through the lens of its own generalizations." He refuses to offer that Left "another account of the massacre." Instead he proposes a sixth note: "A white page. A page for voices that never reached us" — those without English, without literacy, without legitimacy, killed by the state or filtered out by decades of stolen public space. Out of respect, he stops there.

What does this change for the reader? It documents, in real time, how a massacre breaks not only bodies and networks but the tools — translation, archiving, explanation — that diaspora writers normally rely on. The editors' note says the group sat on these texts for months, unsure what to do with them. Their decision to publish them unedited, brackets, stutters and all, makes the finished piece itself the argument: a record of language failing, and of five writers staying in the room anyway.