By Shahram Khosravi

“What should we do when the heaven turns away from us?” I was asked this some years ago by a childhood friend from our village in Zagros mountains. What he meant was this: how do we continue to be a people when the world we knew has been torn apart? When what once gave meaning to life is gone?

“We should sing,” I said, because I did not know how else to answer his deeply political and at the same time existential question.

These days, when the world is falling apart for Iranians, his question keeps returning to me. The only answer that comes to mind is almost the same: we should defend the language.

Natalie Diaz, an Indigenous poet of Mojave heritage, asks a question that feels just as urgent:

“What is the language we need to live right now?”

Like my friend’s question, hers emerges from within ongoing disaster. It calls us to imagine and practice a language that resists dehumanization. A language that resists the ruination of what makes us human, a language that helps us stay alive together.

Dark times, as Hannah Arendt wrote, are when disaster takes place and we have no language for it. Darkness is when we lose a common language to name the horrors falling upon us. Iranians are witnessing how their shared language is failing.

Language is a relational practice, not merely communication. Which words, which stories can help us continue as a people? What ways of speaking and listening are necessary so that more of us can remain alive?

In Persian, the phrase dam zadan, linking breath and speech, reflects an idea that many Indigenous and poetic traditions also carry: language is not abstract, it is breath, and breath is life. The verb dam zadanmeans to breathe, and also to speak and to claim. A breath is a claim. If speech comes from breath, then speaking is a life act. To speak is to expend life force. To be silenced is a form of suffocation. A breath is never just air; it is a declaration. The term khafeghan captures this fusion, used in Iran to mean both suffocation and political repression. Controlling breathing, and thereby controlling voices, becomes possible through the shrinking of social air.

What language will help us breathe right now?

Breath is never solitary. The air we breathe is always shared, which makes breathing relational. Speech works the same way. Another Persian word I want to mention is hamdam, meaning someone who shares your breath, the one who is with you in every breath. It names shared being, togetherness.

This mirrors Diaz’s emphasis on relationality. The language we need is not dominating, accusing, or excluding. It is open. It is shared.

The word conspiracy is combination of two Latin words, con and spirare meaning “to breathe together”. We should conspire against the toxic air, against injustices. We should conspire, breathe together and turn the air into a medium of solidarity and action. 

What language lets us breathe again?

To breathe together, despite everything, in order to speak relationally;  this is how we participate in life itself.