Exit from English: Iran in the political economy of translation

Mada

2 days ago

At the wake of the Jina uprising in September 2022, I found myself compulsively translating to my Arab friends. The madness and the euphoria of the moment could easily tip into sentimental clichés and it demanded the work of artists, poets and writers to shift a subtle idea, the particular details of a story — details in which dehumanization cracks and falls away — across the cultural iron wall built around Iran. I was adamant that the addressee of these letters were the Arabs. Afterall, I wished to show them a rich and textured image, the mourning rituals turned mass mobilization and organization (the 7th day, the 40th day commemoration), the Shia intertwinement of death and revolutionary love, the complexities, peripheries, the Balooch, Arabs and Kurds barred from mainstream Farsi platitudes. I wished to show them another revolution, perhaps up to par with what they cherished and remembered of 1979. Secretly, there was even something like national pride. Maybe we could make history twice in half a century, this time with widely different protagonists: women and highschoolers. In my memory, Iran was stalled at that age, my high school years, as time moved on in my mosaic of migration. During Jina, the high schooler returned: compulsive, irrational, undisciplined. She wrote one letter after another to her friends, knowing well that she's only a stand-in, a surrogate writing in place of others, translating what was not hers to fully claim.
By month six, the scenes had changed. The streets no longer carried the sound of jubilation. The dances in the graveyards, on the tombstones, had quieted. They were replaced by the fragile smiles and tattooed arms of young boys lined up for execution. Mothers pounded on the cold gates of detention centers and prisons. The revolutionary spark declined into depression. I snapped out of the mania. The low that follows the high. And with it, came the quiet shame — the embarrassment of feelings laid bare — the trap of a reality built on the small screen of an iPhone, caught in the endless doom scroll of the culture war, the virtual landscape of opinion-forming, or whatever name we give it.
The shame of reconciliation with the seductive fantasy called 'a people' is that in the early days of Jina, it was as though the lines of separation and demarcation between us in diaspora and those in Iran were momentarily lifted. The Berlin protest in October 2022 saw an unprecedented number of people. Long rows of tens of thousands that, for a moment, resembled a 'multitude.' Besides the flood of content on social media, the opposition media channels, Iran International, Manoto TV and BBC Persian were in full gear, feeding the tweeter machines and Instagram stories with a constant stream of journalistic input. I remember vividly the quiet struggle to sidestep their content, even as it popped up from every corner of my screen. As proud as I was to have dodged the bullet with those platforms, I now wake to a flood of Telegram channels, individual reporters, artist-led Instagram accounts, celebrity activists (even imprisoned ones) that I may have unknowingly promoted or helped circulate. Many now openly support the depraved 'regime change' operation through military invasion.
I still believe that Jina was the uprising of the margins, of women, and the tough task required of a materialist thinker is to not fall for the soothing chronological account of failure that will have us see the event as the phenomenological split, simultaneously positing one into in the aftermath of the defeat (depression) and a victorious past (melancholia) — the before of victory, the after of defeat. At a certain point in a movement, it appears as though a voice is co-opted, a movement captured, a point at which a subject becomes a pawn. Behind this instance of appearance, there is a long-standing essence: a counterrevolution that has finally gone mainstream. That moment, for the astonishing window of possibility that was Jina, was the early morning of June 13, when the first Israeli missile struck Iran's Azerbaijan. In the flash of those Israeli bombs, the full arc of decades-long imperial myth-making and financed hasbara stretched out before us. Decades of manufacturing consent, conditioning the idea of liberation via F-35s, drawing the lines between civilian and non-civilian lives, in the occasion of the jets' 'precision' strikes razing entire building blocks to the ground.
The dialectical image appears from a past, a rescue effected in a moment of urgency. In the constellation formed from that first bomb on June 13, the pixelated engraving on the makeshift headstone over Jina's grave, Ruhollah Khomeini descending from the Iran Air flight in Mehrabad airport in 1979, another embryonic image appears through the mist: the Green Movement of 2009, its aftermath and failures. Yet another event deracinated in the revisionist spirit of the moment, an event many of us have tried to distance ourselves from. Though it took place before the Arab Spring revolutions and uprisings, the Green Movement faded into the ambient of the Middle East for the years to come. Flashing forth again in that biblically-promised war in June, it compelled me to revisit it in an attempt to vindicate some of its bygone demands, to read the causality of war as structural rather than chronological.
The Green Movement was the uprising of my generation. 'Where is my vote,' the silent march of two million people walking down Azadi street from the Revolution Square all the way to the Freedom Square, the same stretch in which guns were fired, blood was shed, and 15 years later, its pavement saw Israeli drones and bombs. No one emerged victorious from the Green Movement, neither the state nor the people. One way or another, all were left defeated as the dust settled — especially, above all, the social movements, from workers councils and student associations to grassroots feminist networks that formed the political discourse post the 1979 revolution.
During the reformist period under President Mohammad Khatami, Iran operationalized its constitutional and legal foundation for the formation of associations and syndicates. Building on Article 26 of the Constitution and the 1981 political parties law, the government began officially recognizing independent student associations, labor syndicates, trade unions and women's rights groups, integrating them into the formal political and civil landscape. At the same time, the 1990 labor law — notably Articles 131 to 139, along with stricter enforcement during the reformist era — granted workers the right to form guild societies and Islamic labor councils and to engage in collective bargaining, as well as protections like maternity leave and a minimum working age. While independent trade unions remained restricted, these measures represented a significant advance toward legally grounded labor syndicates within the state's regulatory framework. Prominent among these initiatives were the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (SWTSBC), Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane Mill Labor Syndicate, the One Million Signatures Campaign (for the repeal of discriminatory laws against women), the Iranian Teachers' Trade Association, and a plethora of Islamic associations in universities that were operational since the revolution and were infiltrated in those years by progressive leftist factions and members of the student body.
These groups' proliferation during Khatami's two-term tenure had evolved dialectically in tandem with the transformation of reform from a vibrant grassroots movement into a rigid, institutionalized system. The official reformist line's strategy remained uniformly the same: bargaining from above, negotiations that only unfolded behind-the-scenes in lieu of the public sphere, a fixation on gaining executive and legislative power, and securing participation solely at the ballot box. What was always overlooked — neglected groups, such as gender, religious and ethnic minorities, contract workers, Afghan migrants and slum dwellers, who were even degraded as criminals and thugs in official discourse — had no impact on the reformist party's self-assessment of their performance. Starting in 2000, the mantra of 'moving beyond Khatami' gained ground among these autonomous groups and associations, who eventually withdrew their strategic participation in the official project of reform, leaving the electoral scene open to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an outlier to the Islamic Republic system until 2004, his first term in office. But with all the challenges and setbacks, in these eight years, bottom-up and face-to-face organizing within these movements was taking place at multiple scales, from rural areas to small towns and major cities.
The excess of the political forces forged in the earlier reformist period — now partly repressed and operating under duress, excluded from political representation and the public sphere — resurfaced to reclaim the streets in the June 2009 elections. The rallying point for this public sentiment was Mir Hossein Mousavi, a foundational revolutionary and former prime minister who had steered Iran through the eight-year war with Iraq via a wartime command economy. Mousavi's legacy was closely tied with the early ideals of the revolution — redistributive justice and economic egalitarianism. His re-entry into politics after a two-decade hiatus sent a powerful signal to the state. In his longstanding dispute with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mousavi came to embody a return to the core tenets of the revolution that many believed had been derailed over the preceding 30 years, even as he was part of a milieu responsible for the massacres and systemic elimination of the left during his term in office.
With all of that, on that fateful afternoon of Khordad 25 [1], it wasn't Mousavi who climbed onto the van amid the million silent protesters in Tehran to defend the people's vote. I saw it with my own eyes. He was pushed to go up there. It wasn't Mousavi who was speaking. He was initially reluctant to speak. The small megaphone was passed and pressed into his hand by the crowd. It was the people who spoke through that makeshift scuffed megaphone. In that moment, Mousavi was the will of the people.
Four days later, in his notorious Friday prayer speech, Khamenei delivered the final word: 'Mr. Ahmadinejad's opinions are closer to mine.' These words marked the end of a narrative still optimistic in the possibility of democratic electoral representation and its dreams of socio-cultural opening. In the public eye, the discourse of reform — which was vaster, far-reaching and expansive — was collapsed into the narrow frame of the official reformist front [2]. Over time, the two became synonymous, sharing missteps and failures, even as the state purged itself of the last remnants of internal reformist factions. The years to come witnessed the downfall of all metrics of social life: the expansion of economic corruption under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the stranglehold of sanctions, further repression and criminalization of political dissent, journalism and culture. Disillusioned by the failures of cultural reform and increasingly impoverished, with their purchasing power in steady decline, the middle classes were gradually conditioned to abandon the notion of self-determination and place their hopes in a foreign savior. If the Green Movement marked a return to the socialist ideals of the 1979 revolution — this time with the participation of those denied the revolution's promise — what followed in its stead was the prologue to Iran's long counter-revolution.
Seen from the vantage point of the so-called '12-day war,' [3] that was the moment when the meticulous and insidious campaign of regime change propaganda, supported by an array of far-right and Zionist lobbies and emissaries, began to gain momentum outside of Iran. Free-to-air TV channels joined the ranks of the poorly-produced kitsch satellite networks based in Los Angeles which, until that point, had mostly targeted the nostalgic nerve of an older, post-revolutionary exile, and were a laughing stock and party entertainment for most of those inside Iran.
Some of the most influential of these media platforms are:
Manoto TV (founded in 2010, owned by Marjan Television Network which have managed to hide their financial backers to this date)
Iran International (established in 2017 in London, backed by a Saudi-British investor with ties to the Saudi government)
Independent Farsi (founded in 2019, owned and operated by the Saudi Research and Marketing Group)
BBC Persian (that had existed as a web platform from 2001 and launched its television officially in 2009 targeting Farsi-speaking audiences, particularly in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan).
Manoto TV stood out as an exemplary project of this strategy, cleverly centering its programming on popular reality shows — game and contest shows hosted by former stars and celebrities, like the regionally beloved Googoosh — besides revisionist documentaries romanticizing the so-called golden age of Iran's monarchist past and the Pahlavi dynasty. In a climate where the state's crackdown on the social fabric in Iran had reached its peak, these soft-power initiatives — funded by Saudi, American and British interests — drew an increasingly large audience. Manoto's documentary productions were branded under the umbrella program 'Toonel-e-Zaman' (Time Tunnel). 'The past lights the path to the future,' the series' caption on Manoto TV's website goes, 'in the hope that these truths remain for future generations,' following the script of the international right's playbook and its total claim on nostalgia. Building atop the burial mounds of contingent histories that the left of Iran must excavate, the Time Tunnel came to redeem unrealized dreams of capitalist development in the Pahlavi era with factual distortions and unsubstantiated figures.
Complementary to Manoto's entertainment-oriented programming, Iran International has focused exclusively on news coverage. A year into the Gaza genocide, their dedicated reporter based in Tel Aviv, Babak Eshaghi, produced the viral abject segment in which he handwrote 'Woman, Life, Freedom' with a marker on the rubble of a destroyed house in Gaza. In 2022, an independent survey identified Iran International as the most influential independent news outlet in Iran, reaching 33 percent of the daily audience in Iran. Additionally, over half of the 27,000 respondents indicated they trusted Iran International either 'a lot' or 'to some extent. ' [4]
At a point along the conveyor belt of manufactured consent, the function of this theater of lies becomes clear: from mere informers to gatekeepers of truth, they are presented to international human rights institutions, accompanied by a trail of awards, ceremonies, peace prizes, freedom of speech galas and Nobel dinners: a technologically-mediated infrastructure of translation, once in Farsi now as English.
It is not arbitrary that Frantz Fanon begins his psychosocial description of the colonized subject from the problem of language. For Fanon, the 'humanity of the colonized' in the Caribbean, their entry into civilization, was measured in 'direct ratio of his mastery of the French language,' [5] a code or key to open doors historically barred to a people. In the case of contemporary Iran, the predicament Fanon described is hardly alien, only now the French of empire has been replaced by the English of global governance, and the colonizer's court has been recast as the tribunal of international opinion. In the recursive and interceptive loops of translation, we begin to perceive ourselves through the gaze of the English-speaking other to whom we once presented ourselves. We begin to think ourselves 'in English,' or more precisely, in the international-human-rights-English that has supplanted older tongues of power.
On the third eve of the bombardment, a statement signed by six prominent figures encapsulated the culmination of this military-psyop-complex: 'No to War, No to Nuclear Enrichment, No to the Islamic Republic'. Signed by Noble Peace laureates Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi and recent Cannes Palm d'or and major category award winners Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, the statement condemned the Iranian regime for pursuing its nuclear program to the detriment of people's peace and wellbeing, leaving out any mention of Israel as the foreign aggressor and violator of Iran's sovereignty, as if the drones had flown on their own will and the jets navigated the skies of Iranian cities without pilots.
As writer Reza Khandan noted recently, human rights celebrities 'are the joint product of the regime's heavy-handed repression and the support of imperialist institutions. Given the existential nature of the war between Iran and Israel, these individuals were forced to choose sides.' In other words, these dear souls, whose worth has been measured only in the currency of Western social capital, find themselves with little choice but to participate, otherwise 'their precious years have gone up in flames behind bars – wasted, with no lesson taken and no wisdom earned.'
The human rights ambassadors may anchor much of this vast infrastructure of translation, yet our participatory media ecology has made each of us a small-scale human rights translator, working tirelessly around the clock through our Instagram and Twitter feeds. This network of live translators forms an appeal committee — but who is the addressee of this appeal? Who are we, the English-speaking diaspora, making this plea on behalf of Iranians inside the country, speaking to? We find ourselves in familiar territory — the critique of human rights — but it's important to underscore and understand the specific ways Iran has been woven into the rights discourse to work effectively with our critical tools. The picture that emerges is of a carefully orchestrated, decades-long, capital-heavy cultural project that has captured the political imagination of many different groups of Iranians.
These groups are not alien to us, they are among our family members and friends: the older generation of dissident left who exited Iran after the revolution, our senior reactionaries so to speak, mired in contempt and resentment for a lost left, shuffling between attention trap junk games and clickbait Whatsapp groups on their smartphones; the younger generation that has grown up in the absence of this intergenerational historical transference, both inside and outside; those of us schooled in Western liberal democratic institutions steeped in political correctness and its terror of social exclusion, who, paralyzed by fear of ideological incoherence fall prey to third-wayism. [6] As if what matters most is our ideological consistency and moral purity in the very present, while we abandon the future to absolute chaos with no imagination of organizing the day after the fall of the regime. An unattended imagination that, as we know from experience across the region, is anything but empty. It is a framed picture of Dubai.
I keep coming back to that first stir, the Green Movement of 2009. My experience of the Green Movement is split in two: the wake of it lived on the streets of Tehran with my friends, and the remaining months of the movement's depression and crackdown spent in Canada in the first year of immigration. And here lies the difference: the single principle common among different factions of opposition at that point was still 'self-determination, not foreign intervention.' During the so-called '12-day war,' I thought a lot about the distinctions between different generations of the Iranian diaspora and the principles they stood by. For us, the generation of the Green Movement, the activities, talks, panels and gatherings we organized as part of the student movement in diaspora were not glamorous, and they received little to no attention. Much of this content and these sessions were produced in Farsi for the Farsi-speaking community, led by volunteer students, and held on university campuses we had free access to. These conversations ran across generations — they were co-organized by us 20-year-olds in collaboration with our parents, their friends and the older participants of the 1979 revolution in exile. In fact, this was the first time as a 20 year old that I formed comradely friendship with my parents' generation, directly, outside of the household's community and the family structure. It is indeed unsettling, and even more frightening, to see how we have transitioned from such salient demands and activities to the shrill chorus of regime change by all means possible, in just a span of 16 years.
To reckon with the Green Movement means, first, to set aside its past reclamations on the basis of its non-violent axioms, its blind faith in democratic governance, the peaceful nature of its protests, drawn by its middle class urban-dweller sensibilities. As well, the counter-revolutionary longue durée it set in motion has not unfolded along a homogeneous trajectory; it has experienced its own fluctuations and ruptures. The 2019 – 2020 protests — codenamed Bloody November — were sparked by rising fuel prices and, notably, unleashed with minimal presence in major cities such as Tehran, taking place primarily in the Arab province of Ahwaz [7] and marginalized provinces along Iran's securitized borders. At first glance, they may appear as outliers to the grand democratic aspirations of 2009. Yet within the slow and steady continuum of state-led privatization and neoliberalization, these uprisings represented discrete moments in which labor and class struggles in Iran — increasingly racialized and gendered over the past decades — connected with broader international movements against the informalization of labor. With all its deficiencies however, I believe in the vindication of this particular dimension of the Green Movement — mainly how it organized groups in diaspora, at a moment when we could still mobilize ourselves outside of the glitzy and grand schemas laid out for us, when the principle of self-determination was non-negotiable. The use of first-person pronoun throughout this text is to articulate myself as part of this symptomatic condition: diaspora, both a position I question and an affliction I carry.
There is a political economy to translation. In the shift toward the glamorous world of English, we enter a web of valorization that is necessarily politically-motivated. The symbolic order is not naive — recall how the 12-day Israeli invasion was framed time and again as a set of 'symbolic' attacks on 'symbolic' sites in Iran. A 'symbolic war' so to speak. As alarming as it may sound, today's regime of representation does not merely prophesize war (it perfected that role in Iraq); but it is etched into the very ammunition, the bombs, the rockets, the drones, and into the bodies, buildings, sites and landscapes on which it chooses to land. As a feminist comrade in Iran said a few months prior to the attack, 'the first bomb dropped on us will most likely have 'Woman, Life, Freedom' engraved on it.'
Perhaps my disavowal of English at this historical conjuncture has something to do with its status as the code to the discourse of the hegemon, of the hegemony of the US Dollar, and the total capture of alienation and abstraction by metric power and datafied governance. [8] In this disavowal there is a certain cynicism about the possibility of reappropriation and reclamation of this medium — English — for that contested venerable project: International Solidarity.
I return time and again to Islam El Khatib's recounting of the problem of translation in relation to the work of Palestine Research Center in Beirut in the 1960s, which made 'a strategic choice to focus on the Arab masses, primarily because the foreigners who mattered most were already there, fighting with Palestinians,' unlike today, 'the focus on translation was much less about convincing and more about bridging and co-building.' The stakes of translation, that Khatib is so cogently elucidating, is the ground from which one speaks. Palestine was once unmediated, to be with it was to be there with its people, and it drew legions of guerrilla fighters, in groups or as individuals, toward its gravitational pull across the borders. Many things have changed in that span of time between the 1960s and the present, and Iran is certainly not Palestine. But as diaspora contaminated by the empire, we can similarly formulate our struggle from the ground that supports our feet, and unlearn that desire to convince, the yearning to contextualize and become the good native informants. To disappear from the gaze that insists we make sense on its terms. To exit the impulse for being understood by an anonymous English-speaking audience. To understand our own audiences, and our capacities and strengths for connecting with them. Otherwise, the neoliberal axiom of indeterminacy steps in to fill the void left by third-wayist purity and uncertainty with its own blood-fuelled program. It will drive the silence into the conclusion of regime change by any and all means. To have our feet on the ground — the same ground that rewards our 'freedom' with headlines and handshakes, and punishes resistance against genocide and war like the Palestine Action Group with raids and arrests. For if we manage to do this, to keep our feet on the ground, there will be a time again to take back alienation. [9]
My friends joined me at the 2022 Berlin march in the feminists and queer bloc. One arrived wearing a keffiyeh, conspicuously absent from the rest of the scene. This wasn't the Berlin of 2025. We stood there as I translated the speech of the lead organizer, Hamed Esmailioun, in her ear, word by word. That evening over dinner, another friend pointed out the long, parallel procession to our left, where the monarchist flag waved alongside the flag of Israel. I was irritated. My vision had edited them out. Of all the insurgent ecstasy that day in Berlin, this was the single frame my friend had taken away. A month later, Esmailioun would join the Georgetown coalition, alongside femo-imperialist warmonger Masih Alinejad and the monarchist heir Reza Pahlavi, and, by June this year, would come to be seen among the human rights celebrities cheering the war on. It's taken the three years between 2022 and 2025 to fully reckon with the malaise of that united front. The longer the weekly Palestine marches in London persist, the more it feels like that one-time gathering in Berlin was a populist mirage.
As for resolutions, the most utopian task I can envision from this counterrevolutionary delirium — perhaps even a bit childish — is taking up Arabic classes. We are the recipients of a polyphonic tradition, in a pluricultural region of tongues and languages before the devastating nation-building endeavors. This is not diversity. Quite the contrary, a multilingualism for the present cuts through the bleached out discourse of the liberal institution. It joins the ranks of secret dialects and coded slangs that underground networks use to evade capture. To work toward a world beyond the supremacy of Dollar is to have faith in a world after the hegemony of English, where we exchange through other means and mediums, outside the intercepting mediation of English.
In the interim, the revolution lives on. We recognize each other through the mist of decades and its eventful punctuations, and we admire: the commendable coverage of our journalists at home, the principled stances of our prisoners under the threat of execution, of those resisting with their pens, and as always, our teachers on the streets, in the margins, at homes, in factories. And I wish when our next uprising comes, I translate it for my friends in Arabic.
***
[1] June 15, 2009 in the Christian calendar
[2] The Second of Khordad Front, the principal umbrella organization of reformist political groups, formed during Khatami's first year in office
[3] The so-called '12-day War' was first coined in Donald Trump's tweet, before we had the capacity to give it its proper denomination. We also learned about the attacks on nuclear sites through his tweets. Later in the essay, I'll explore the ways in which this war was coded within a symbolic regime — designed, manufactured and distributed via this military-platform nexus.
[4] Accompanied by the combination of state crackdown on cultural life in Iran, which even seeped into the little wins and small openings in the fortress of the National Radio and Television Broadcasting — for example the relatively imaginative programming on channel 4 focused on independent and alternative cinema and documentary films, theater, film analysis, panels on philosophy and critical theory, independent and amateur sciences — were replaced by hardliner programming and regurgitating fundamentalist propaganda.
[5] Frantz Fanon, 'Black Skin, White Masks', 1986, Pluto Press, London.
[6] Seen in the proclamations 'No to War, no to Islamic Republic,' heard during the June war, that replace resolute condemnation of Israel's assault on a sovereign country with a symbolic co-equivalence, a gesture devoid of political stakes.
[7] Arab Ahwazi's preferred name for the province commonly known in official Farsi contexts as Khuzestan
[8] I have learned this lesson first and foremost through my practice as an artist operating in the neoliberal paradigm of art — i.e. contemporary art — that animates a global market by translating all local specificities into the indeterminate level playing field of liberal institutions, recoding the sensible into data points via English.
[9] To sit with the confusion of this illegibility may be a part of it, but it is nonetheless the work that we need to take on. The sacrifices involved in stepping away from English cannot be overlooked. It carries real costs. It means exiting the grid of visibility and appreciation within our liberal democratic order, and the financial rewards it brings forth. And here we need to address the question of organizing, the challenging economy of assembly, for infrastructures of support that can facilitate this exit. For that, we need look no further than Palestinian initiatives and self-led projects for both inspiration and guidance.