Prologue: A Turning Point – The Iran–Iraq War

Summary

I was born in Firuzgar Hospital in Tehran, on 20 November 1974. The first of four children, my birth as a girl was not too appealing to the family, a common Middle Eastern mindset at the time. For the first eight years of my life, I grew up with my extended family – grandparents, aunts and an uncle – in the same house in the Hishmatiyyih (Marvdasht) neighbourhood, in a single room with my parents. My oldest brother was born in 1978, but it was not until my sister was born in 1982, in the early years of the Iran–Iraq War, that we moved to our own rental apartment in the Karim Khan Zand neighbourhood (near Haft-i Tir). Later, in 1984, my father managed to receive loans to purchase his first ever property in the Hishmatiyyih neighbourhood where my grandparents used to live. Much of my childhood was spent in this house, until we moved to a new house in a new neighbourhood in Narmak (eastern Tehran) in 1989.

My mom tells me that she knew I was an old soul even from the very first years of my life (Figure P.1). I was so mature compared to my peers, she says, but I wonder if much of this maturity was because I did not enjoy a carefree childhood. As the oldest of four and looking after my siblings, I was always given more responsibility than my peers. My younger brother Ejmin was born in 1989, right after the war had ended and Khomeini had died.

The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) was an enormous blow to my childhood and to everyone else's life in the country. One of my second cousins became the first Armenian martyr in the war, and another second cousin was held as prisoner of war in Iraqi prisons until 1990. I was six years old when the war began and fourteen when it ended. The trauma of the war remained with me, in recurring nightmares and somatic trauma responses, for decades after it had ended, until I began teaching a course on ‘‘wars and veterans’’ at UNC-Chapel Hill in the spring of 2017.