Everyday life is the only thing left when the protests die down

My essay in Equator magazine

I published the essay below in Equator magazine. My gratitude to Negar Azimi for the invitation. At the bottom of this page, please see a link (and click on the link!) to a must read conversation in the magazine with Arang Keshavarzian about the yesterday, today, and tomorrow of the situation in Iran and sign up for the Equator newsletter.

When Rahaa finally calls, it’s 6:30 am and I’m just beginning my routine of checking WhatsApp and Telegram in the hope that the internet has come back. I fumble the phone with one hand, worried that she’ll hang up before I manage to answer. Her voice is vivid, as if we’re in the same room. “How’s it going little donkey?” I say. She laughs. “Good, little donkey.” I don’t remember how we had settled on this ridiculous nickname for each other, but after 45 years of friendship, it had stuck.

Last week, Iran shut down all communications with the outside world in the midst of yet another countrywide protest. This time, the trigger was economic desperation – the downward slide of the currency against the dollar offered a full-on plunge into an abyss. It was the shopkeepers who protested first. The students followed.

On 8 January, before vast numbers of people took to the streets, Rahaa, myself and some other friends had been having a group chat about the logic of supporting Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, who had positioned himself as an alternative to the Islamic Republic. Was he a leader? Did it make sense to support a man who in the 47 years since the revolution toppled his family didn’t seem to do much beyond jump in front of the camera every time Iranians took to the streets? It’s not about logic anymore, someone said. We can’t live like this anymore. Anything, anyone but this. As usual, Rahaa and I were having our own side chat. “Hope we can see each other soon,” she texted. I texted two kisses back. After that, my WhatsApp messages to her sat in my phone with one check mark. Sent but not yet received.

Only a trickle of images came out of Iran in the days that followed but they tell of a horrifying crackdown on protestors. The government says the dead number in the hundreds. The New York Times suggests over 3000. Outside human rights groups say 12,000. People on Persian social media accuse each other of moral depravity for preferring one number over the other. A 16-minute video comes out of Iran of body bags in a cavernous room at the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center. The camera reveals people milling about, searching for their loved ones. Some are draped over the corpses of those they have lost. “There are so many [bodies] inside the warehouse, you can’t go in,” someone says.

When Rahaa finally calls, I ask, “How’s it going?” We’re both children of 1980s Iran and treat every phone conversation as if it’s bugged. It’s going ok, she says slowly, choosing her words carefully. Life is back to normal. We’re all back to work, though working hours are cut short. She knows I know what she means: Nightfall is when the guns go hunting after what’s left of the protestors. But during the day, life looks as it was before. Work, home, life. I ask about the younger people in her family. I know she knows what I mean: In these protests, it’s the younger ones, the ones with little fear, that we worry about most. Everyone’s safe, she says. We’re alive, she says. She then tells me about work, how it’s become a space to keep each other safe and get things off her chest. She doesn’t mention the protests, doesn’t say if she knows anyone who has been arrested, wounded, or killed. We keep talking about the everyday. Mine and hers.

*

The word Iranians keep using to describe their condition is istisal, which translates to desperation but is more like a compilation of all its definitions into a single feeling: a pulling of roots, deracination, a sense of no hope, no ability, a sense of being destroyed. Before the protests broke out, food inflation was up roughly 72% compared to the year before. The price of chicken had jumped by 60%. People felt crushed between government corruption and crippling foreign sanctions. But this istisal is not just about economics. It’s also about a widespread sense of paralysis in the aftermath of the June 2025 war. Everyone has been expecting another Israeli-American strike. It’s a sign of just how dire things are that for some this expectation is tinged with both desire and fear. It would be easy to suggest that fear of war, or Iranians’ fiercely held belief in independence and national sovereignty would make them reject outside intervention at all costs. Istisal questions that neat proposition.

When our phone call ends, I try to imagine the rest of Rahaa‘s day. Did she make herself a coffee? Did she leave work and stop at a grocery store? Go to her mom’s? What book is she reading? I think about the fact that if I had to report on what I had learned from our call, I would have scant information to relay. No pyrotechnic news of demonstrations or death. Nothing but a picture of an ordinary day in the life of a citizen in a country in turmoil. In Second-hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich’s extraordinary oral history of the Soviet Union, she writes: “It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is.”

The blurry videos of people in the streets chanting for freedom or the sight and sounds of armed men shooting, sometimes with automatic rifles, into crowds or onto the backs of people fleeing already belong to a past that is gone but not finished. The snippets of phone calls coming out tell of a people who have gone back to work and school, back to a normal life that in truth was never normal to begin with. It’s hard not to notice the look of disappointment on journalists’ faces when I relay this. Iranians are only newsworthy when they are chanting or fleeing or crying or dead.

Everyday life is the only thing left when the protests die down. And it is in that everyday life where the real violence, the violence of despair, lies. The demon Ken says in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “What is Hell, but the total absence of Hope? The substance, the tactile proof of despair?” Hell is not in streets filled with voices chanting. It is not even in the horrific images of body bags laid in a cavernous hall. The total absence of hope is when the guns go quiet, the protestors go home, and the cycle of the everyday begins again.

I think of this as I scroll through videos of demonstrations, most of which date to 8 January, when images were still making their way out, before the internet cut. I think of it as I scroll through social media posts by Iranians outside of Iran, most of which are composed in a dirge register. There is talk of mass execution and speculation of an imminent US attack. A colleague tells me that they got so tired of scrolling to see if and when the US attacks Iran that they asked ChatGPT to send them a message when it does. Fifteen minutes later, they got an alert and their heart sank. “No attack yet,” the idiot machine told them.

I linger over one video in particular. It’s shot from inside of what looks like a store. A man is slowly walking away from the camera towards the exit when a figure runs by followed by several uniformed, armed men shouting. The man pauses but keeps moving, slowly. Guns are raised and shots are fired off camera. The man doesn’t even jump or crouch. He looks left, he looks right. I notice he’s holding a shopping bag. I wonder what he will do next. The video ends. I hope he made it home.

(You can read this piece, Arang Keshavarzian’s “An Explosion Long in the Making” and more on the Equator website: https://www.equator.org/articles)