Art Aware: A Land Made of Mirrors and Stone:

A literary response to the incursion on Iran

by Ezz Monem. Courtesy Arena Online

When Israeli missiles rained down on Iranian soil, many of in the Iranian diaspora froze, not only in fear, but in recognition. We had seen this story before: skies lit up with war, silence from allies, and a region forced to choose between repression at home or destruction from abroad.

I’ve lived half my life in Australia, and the other half between several countries, including Iran. Iran, where I was born, a place that, like Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, is now living under the shadow of aggression, facing the unfolding plans of a so-called “New Middle East.”

For those who have known Iranians or heard them speak of their home, Iran is not just a name on a map. When Iranians talk about their country, they don’t just place a finger over geography. They usually describe their homeland in descriptive detail, pointing to the Caspian Sea, to the green forests and jagged mountains where you can ski and climb, or to the southern islands in the Persian Gulf, where dolphins dance in turquoise water, or to the deserts with their copper skies and wind-sculpted silence.

But often, they’ll tell you what Iran means to them. And their tone changes.

They’ll speak of the light-catching beauty of muqarnas, those intricate, honeycombed domes and ceilings in houses, palaces, mosques, synagogues, and churches, and fire temples, like in Isfahan, Tehran, or Yazd, built from wood, mirror, and tile. They’ll describe the mirrorwork, where thousands of broken shards are placed in impossible precision. It’s as if the very ceilings are made of shattered history, reassembled into something stronger, something that refuses to disappear.

They’ll tell you that Iran is like its Persian carpets, where each knot holds a memory, each motif a tale, woven with patience and pain, joy and endurance. These carpets speak the languages of countless cities and villages, of weavers whose hands carry generations of knowledge in every thread.

They’ll tell you that each dish in Persian cuisine is a work of art, a blend of texture and time. They’ll tell you how to coax the color out of saffron, how to draw fragrance from dried limes and rose petals, how to steep the perfect tea until it is just right. And they will remind you, you need patience. That is the real ingredient.

And when words fail, they’ll open the works of poets Hafez, Rumi, or Khayyam. In grief and celebration alike, they turn to poetry, because Iran has always spoken in verses, even when silenced.

And silenced, they have been.

For over a century, Iranians have struggled, again and again, for freedom, for justice. Their revolutions, their protests, their sacrifices have been betrayed, by foreign coups, by repression, by rulers who forgot they serve the people.

They will tell you that “Iran, for Iranians, is the ultimate joy and the ultimate sorrow.”

Today, many Iranians are again trapped in an unbearable paradox, living under an oppressive regime at home and staring down the barrel of destruction from outside. Some feel abandoned by their own government, unprotected, unheard, unshielded, even as the sky rains fire.

And so, the people are fractured, not because they are enemies of one another, but because they have been left to choose between impossible options.

Some, weary of being silenced, look elsewhere for salvation, and tragically, even to those who drop the bombs.

And then there are those who believe the only shield left is the state, because the alternative, they fear, is annihilation. Each side exists, and between them lies the heartbreak of a people caught between repression and war.

Many of us, the ones in between, are trying to hold the complicated truth. We reject all forms of violence, from within and without. We condemn the strikes, the bombings, and we acknowledge that for years, Iranian voices have cried out for reform, dignity, justice, and were suppressed and silenced.

It is a bitter irony that a government born of revolution speaks of resistance, while exerting its own shadow over neighbouring lands.

Meanwhile, those responsible for destruction speak the language of liberation. The same governments that massacre life in Gaza, that reduce homes in Lebanon to ash, now echo the words “Woman, Life, Freedom” with chilling detachment. The slogan, birthed in Iranian defiance and shaped by the courage of women who risked everything, has become a polished soundbite for regimes whose hands are stained with war. It is unbearable to witness a slogan born from Iranian wounds turned into a tool of propaganda.

There is no freedom in invasion. No justice in airstrikes. No dignity in being forced to choose between authoritarianism and imperialism.

As a woman, I say this: the words “Woman, Life, Freedom” were not written for missiles. They were not chanted for drones. They were not meant to be echoed by those who silence women elsewhere or trade justice for military alliances. Remember when the U.S. invaded neighbouring Afghanistan, and the justification was the liberation of Afghan women, who were then handed back to the Taliban.

What Iranians want, and what Palestinians want, and what many souls in the region yearn for, is a liberation that cannot be bought, a justice that doesn’t depend on obedience, a peace that isn’t handed down by foreign powers with strategic interests.

This era of distortion, this so-called “New Middle East,” is only a return to something old. We’ve seen it in the partitioning of land, in proxy wars dressed up as liberation, in the reshaping of the region by external hands that claim to bring freedom but leave ruin behind. The promises have been recycled. The tactics refined. But the impact remains the same: borders redrawn, identities fractured, lives erased.

Yet even in this inheritance of silence, many refuse to be quiet.

We are not saviors. We are not states. We are simply people, fragmented and grieving, but unwilling to forget. And from the fragments, stories, memories, languages, threads, we speak. Our voices are not neat. But together, they carry the strength of a thousand broken tiles, rearranged, reflected, remade.

The only new order we believe in is one rooted in dignity. And it begins with truth. It begins with memory. And it begins with us.

I have a Palestinian scarf which is from a factory in Gaza. It was gifted to me by a Lebanese poet from South Lebanon, who showed me where Israeli army had once sat outside her village. That house has now been flattened, that factory no longer exists, and everything I love in Iran is now beneath skies filled with drones, with no internet, and no shelter, under strikes by Israel and the United States.

But the scarf still holds its threads.