No Language in Times of War

“I have come here and I am in the midst of one of the greatest turning points in my own fate and that of my lineage. I have come to this corner, into this darkness, in this harsh rain, by the edge of this intoxicated river, in the corner of this dump, and I am weeping in Arabic. The Farsi language is of no use to me, and I do not know French either. I am in Zangaro, speaking Swahili. I stand at the center of the storm of my reality, for which, indeed, no language has yet been invented. And no one cares!”

Sorayya in a Coma is an Iranian novel in which Sorayya, an Iranian woman lying unconscious n a hospital bed in Paris, becomes a haunting figure for a nation suspended between life and death during the eight-year war with Iraq. The narrator watches from a distance, exiled from the immediacy of war, condemned to witness rather than act. What emerges is not only grief but a particular kind of loneliness: the loneliness of seeing clearly while being unable to be a part of what one sees.

I did not understand the full weight of that loneliness until the twelve-day war, a brief but intense 2025 military conflict between Iran and Israel.

Like the narrator, I was not there. I was elsewhere, geographically removed yet psychically entangled. I watched, followed, refreshed, waited. War unfolded in fragments of images and messages. There was a constant sense that something irreversible was happening, and that I was both inside it and excluded from it at the same time.

The war ended, not with resolution, not with clarity, but with suspension. Like Sorayya, still in a coma, her fate technically undecided, yet already known in some deeper register. There is a moment in the novel when the reader understands, without being told, that she will not wake up. That what appears as waiting is in fact a slow movement toward death.

At the time, that death had not yet arrived. Now it has. The war unfolding now, with the attacks of Israel and the United States o