“We begin in darkness. A siren screams. The invaders come from the desert in a cloud of dust. The king gathers his army at a mountain castle. A single battle decides our fate. The battle burns, the din of drums, the clash of axes, the spark of swords. The dirt turns clay with blood. The sun goes down on a fallen flag. The day is lost. The king is gone. Our people are left defenseless. The only weapon we have left is our voice. So they come for our words. Scholars are murdered, books are burned, entire libraries are turned to dust. Until nothing remains. Not even memories of who we were. Silence. The sun comes up on a knight galloping across the land. He summons the teachers, the scholars, the authors, the thinkers. He tells them to gather the words that remain: the books, the scrolls, the letters, the verses. Everything that escaped the burning pits. Then he summons the sages. The keepers of our oldest myths, from before the written word. He copies their stories onto the page. Then when all has been gathered, all of the words, only then does he summon a poet. It had to be a poet. Because poetry is music. It sinks into the memory. And in this land of endless war, the only safe library is the memory of the people. It is said that at any given time there are one hundred thousand poets in Iran, but only one is chosen. A single poet, for a sacred mission. Put it all in a poem. Everything they’re trying to destroy. The entire story of our people. Our kings. Our queens. Our castles. Our banquets. Our songs and celebrations. Our goblets filled with wine. Our roasted kebabs. Our moonlit gardens. Our caravans of riches: silken carpets, amber, musk, goblets filled with diamonds, goblets filled with rubies, goblets filled with pearls. Our mountains. Our rivers. Our soil. Our borders. Our battles. Our crumbled castles. Our fallen flags. Our blood. Who we were. Who we were! Our culture. Our wisdom. Our choices. And our words. All of our words. Three thousand years of words, a castle of words! That no wind or rain will destroy! However long it takes, put it all in a poem. All of Iran, in a single poem. A torch to hold against the night! A voice to echo in the dark.”

“I couldn’t find it anywhere. Even on the streets of Tehran—it was nowhere to be seen. The Iran I knew was gone. Everywhere I turned it was nothing but black: black cloaks, black shrouds. The universities were closed, the libraries were closed. Our poets, our singers, our authors, our teachers: one-by-one they were silenced. Until Iran only survived inside our homes. I never planned to leave. I didn’t even have a passport. Twenty years earlier I’d sworn an oath to The Siren: every choice I made, I’d make for Iran. But The Siren was dead. They shredded his heart with bullets. And there was only one choice left: leave and live, or stay and die. It was an eight-hour drive to the Turkish border. Mitra came with me. We rode in silence the entire way. I’ve always wondered how things would have turned out differently if we’d been more aligned. She wanted our lives to be a love story. A surreal romantic journey. She wanted a life of togetherness, surrounded by beauty. For me life was meant to be lived in the pursuit of ideals: truth, justice, freedom. Even if that meant the ultimate sacrifice. We kissed goodbye in the border town of Salmas. In the main square stood a statue of Iran’s greatest poet: Abolqasem Ferdowsi. On that day it was still standing. Soon the regime would tear it down. I spent the night in the house of a powerful family who was known to oppose the regime. Their servants stood around the house with machine guns on their shoulders. Six months later they’d all be dead. On my final morning in Iran I woke with the sun. I knelt on the floor and prayed. The final journey was made on foot. It was six miles to the border, the road climbed through the mountains. It was a closed border; so the road was empty. Every step felt like death. I’ve never cried so many tears. Ferdowsi once wrote: ‘A man cannot escape what is written.’ I’ve always hated that quote. I hate the idea of destiny. There is always a role for us to play. There is always a choice to be made. But on that day it felt like destiny, a river flowing in one direction. And I was a leaf, floating on top. Away from where I wanted to go.”

“It’s been forty-three years since I’ve seen my home. All I have left is a jar of soil. It’s good soil. Nahavand is a city of gardens. A guidebook once called it ‘a piece of heaven, fallen to earth.’ The peaks are so high that they’re capped with snow. A spring gushes from the mountain, and flows into a river. It spreads through the valley like veins. We lived in the deepest part of the valley, the most fertile part. Our father owned thousands of acres of farmland. When we were children he gave us each a small plot of land to plant a garden. None of the other children had the discipline. They’d rather play games. But I planted my seeds in careful rows. I hauled water from a nearby well. I pulled every weed the moment it appeared. As the poets say: ‘If you cannot tend a garden, you cannot tend a country.’ My garden was the best; it was plain for all to see. The discipline came from my mother. She was very devout. She prayed five times a day. Never spoke a bad word, never told a lie. My father was a Muslim too, but he drank liquor and played cards. He’d wash his mouth with water before he prayed. The Koran was in his library. But so were the books of The Persian Mystics: the poets who spent one thousand years softening Islam, painting it with colors, making it Iranian. Back then it was a big deal to own even a single book, but my father had a deal with a local bookseller. Whenever a new book arrived in our province, it came straight to our house. I’ll never forget the morning I heard the knock on the door. It was the bookseller, and in his hands was a brand-new copy of Shahnameh. The Book of Kings. It’s one of the longest poems ever written: 50,000 verses. The entire story of our people. And it’s all the work of a single man: Abolqasem Ferdowsi. Shahnameh is a book of battles. It’s a book of kings and queens and dragons and demons. It’s a book of champions called to save Iran from the armies of darkness. Many of the stories I knew by heart. Everyone in Iran knew a few. But I’d never seen them all in one place before, and in a beautiful, leather-bound edition. The book never made it to my father’s library. I brought it straight to my room.”