Roxanne Varzi

Roxanne Varzi is the author of Warring Souls: Media, Martyrdom and Youth in Post-Revolution Iran. She teaches anthropology and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.

In school we were asked to write a short story: fiction, not autobiography. I began mine with the sentence: ‘Bombs dropped, the sky was ablaze, there was no night.’ The teacher, who had been making her rounds, looking down at our papers as she went, saw mine and sniffed: ‘Fiction does not have to be “real”, but it does have to be truthful. A writer writes what...

Diary: At the Martyrs’ Museum

Roxanne Varzi, 8 March 2007

No one was guarding the gates to the grounds of the Imamzadeh Ali Akbar Cheezari in Tehran, where the son of the Imam Zayn al-Abedin is interred, the first time I visited, in 2000. The mausoleum now stands in a cemetery where hundreds of martyrs of the war with Iraq are buried.

The war institutionalised martyrdom. For the Iranians who volunteered to fight, the Iran-Iraq war, like the battle...

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