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!”

—Esmail Fassih, Sorayya in a Coma  

 

 

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 on Iran, feels like the grim continuation of that earlier moment, a long-feared arrival of death that had been suspended. And it began, this time, with death itself. With the bombing of an elementary school in Minab. With children being killed at the very beginning.

And what makes this moment unbearable is not only the violence itself, but the human response to it. Wait, did I say “human”? Is it?

Even now, I see Iranians in the diaspora celebrating in Western streets—dancing in demonstrations, applauding the attacks, calling them “military aid” for regime change, and justifying the death of children and civilians out of hatred for the regime or desperation to remove it—thanking the lords of war who make this destruction possible. As if war could be a form of salvation. As if bombs could deliver freedom. As if the killing of innocents could be justified by the desire to remove a regime.

It feels, to me, as if Sorayya is not only dying but is being led to her death by her own family.

I do not understand how a human being arrives here. What I find myself facing is not only disagreement but something closer to disbelief, to an existential fragmentation. As if the ground beneath my feet is trembling. As if I no longer have an anchor to keep me attached to life.

As a group analyst, I was trained to think, and had witnessed for years, that when facing an external enemy, a group moves toward cohesion. That internal differences are, at least temporarily, set aside. That a minimal sense of shared fate emerges. But that is not what I am witnessing.

I see people turning on each other. I see voices like mine, voices that say no to war, voices that insist that war is an absolute evil, being dismissed, attacked, erased. I am called a traitor. I am told that refusing war makes me aligned with the regime I myself had to flee.

And I find myself with nothing to hold on to.

Not the shared moral language I thought existed. Not the belief that we inhabit the same reality. Not even the confidence that I can understand how others think.

My experience of what I see—of what I experience as the collapse of humanity, of morality, and the destruction of the life instinct in the hands of blind hatred—is not only theoretical. It is deeply personal. Because the people whose thinking I now struggle to recognize are people I once trusted, people with whom I believed I shared a certain moral language. And this has produced another loss that I did not anticipate: the existential loss of a part of myself.

I have always believed that I am a forgiving person. It is something I quietly valued about myself. Not a naive belief that people never do harm but a deeper conviction that human beings are larger than their worst moments. That remorse and reflection can make repair possible. That relationships can survive even serious failures. This belief is not incidental to my life. It is also central to my profession. Psychoanalysis rests on the assumption that people can change, that through thought, reflection, and the painful recognition of one’s own destructiveness, something new can emerge.

But this moment is testing that belief in ways I never expected.

There are terrible acts that can be forgiven. A person may commit violence in a moment of rage or desperation and later recognize its horror. Remorse can open the possibility of repair. The act belongs to a moment that does not define the entirety of the person.

What I confront now feels different.

These are not impulsive acts. These are positions: considered, articulated, defended. Positions taken by people who have had access to other perspectives, who could read, watch, listen, and think about what war means for human life. People who know, or ought to know, that war destroys not only soldiers but civilians, homes, families, and the psychic fabric of societies—and still they endorse it.

That realization leaves me with a question I cannot easily answer: Even if these people change their minds one day, even if they come to regret what they have supported, will I ever again feel toward them what I once did?

I do not yet know.

What I do know is that war destroys more than bodies and cities. It destroys the invisible structures that make human coexistence possible: trust, shared reality, moral recognition.

And when wars end, as they eventually do, the world counts its losses in the most visible ways: the dead, the ruined cities, the shattered homes. But there are other losses that are harder to name. War does not only leave graves and rubble behind; it alters the inner landscape of those who live through it. It leaves behind relationships that no longer feel inhabitable, recognitions that cannot easily be restored, and a lingering uncertainty about who we have become in the process.

Because when one witnesses the collapse of humanity in others, when people cheer the bombing of their own society, when cruelty is defended as loyalty, something inside the witness is also wounded. Not only one’s trust in others but a part of oneself that once believed forgiveness would always remain possible.

Here I am, walking in the streets of New York, a city not unlike Tehran, looking at the high-rise buildings and asking myself if I will ever see Tehran the way it was. Will that skyline ever be built anew?

I look at the people passing by and find myself afraid to pass by an Iranian, or to hear a familiar language in the street. Something that once filled me with joy in this foreign land now fills me with dread. I hope not to encounter another compatriot, afraid that I will once again be exposed to that rupture, that my heart will break again, that I will be forced to confront the fact that I no longer recognize these people; the unbearable knowledge that I no longer know how to understand the people I once believed I knew.

I keep walking, “weeping in Arabic,” as “the Farsi language is of no use to me” … I am “at the center of the storm of my reality, for which, indeed, no language has yet been invented. And no one cares.” I walk faster through the streets, rushing from one block to another, on my way to see my patients. And I try to convince myself that with them, in a language that is not mine, listening to lives that are not my own, I can find a sense of closeness and calm that now feels denied to me among my own people.